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Just what kind of an operation is Twitter running here? It seems crazy that they don't have any kind of anti-abuse system in place that could just block tweets
by jsnell 6y ago
Just what kind of an operation is Twitter running here? It seems crazy that they don't have any kind of anti-abuse system in place that could just block tweets with this specific Bitcoin address or possibly tweets matching the regexp of any Bitcoin address. I.e. limit the damage and buy a couple of hours while they try to find the root cause.
(Yes, yes, staged rollouts. But anti-abuse systems don't work by those rules, at least in emergencies.)
- actuator 6y agoYeah, I would have guessed a platform like Twitter would have anti-abuse systems with at least term filters.
- Barrin92 6y agoAt this point I'd advocate for a huge red button or a gong that someone can smash and it just halts the platform
- jsnell 6y agoKill-switches are dangerous, since they get built and never get used. I work on an anti-abuse system. It caused two user-visible outages in the last couple of years, one of which was an accidentally triggered kill-switch that had not been used in years and had some unexpected side-effects. So I can see why they wouldn't have one of those pre-built for setting the entire site to a read-only mode. It's not at all obvious whether the risks are larger with or without that capability built in. But a spam filter with configs you can push quickly seems like table stakes, and should be a system that gets excercised weekly if not daily.
- catalogia 6y ago> Kill-switches are dangerous, since they get built and never get used. What about the circuit breakers at their data centers? Serious question..
- MattGaiser 6y agoYou don't need to kill the entire site. Just the ability to post new messages.
- actuator 6y agoThey are somewhat right. I have built these feature flag/kill switch kind of things and they rarely get tested. Over time it might not even work or have other side effects. On the other hand, a product like Twitter having some content moderation filter seems very likely.
- MattGaiser 6y ago> they rarely get tested. One of the largest problems of our industry.
- castratikron 6y ago"This is a test of the emergency broadcast system..."
- dmix 6y ago"Press okay if you want to enable cookies"
- Nextgrid 6y agoEven if there is no "huge red button", at this stage it should be easy to reconfigure their load balancers to just return 500 for all endpoints or even take down their DNS records and essentially shut down the platform until they sort it out.
- Lobosque 6y agoThis seems like a pretty big red button.
- Nextgrid 6y agoIf there was no other option I would personally go as far as pulling the power, data loss be damned. This is in many ways worse than your typical large-scale malware or ransomware crisis (like the one that hit Maersk for example). Malware or ransomware attacks are typically limited to internal company impact with potential stolen data (which you usually discover after it’s been stolen already). This current situation however has ongoing external impact for as long as the platform is kept online and could even have geopolitical repercussions if a certain high-profile “real” account ends up affected. The fact that they left the platform online for so long with an ongoing, uncontained attack is absolutely irresponsible.
- Klathmon 6y agoIf this exploit is deep enough, the attackers might be disabling the anti-abuse systems as well.
- arduinomancer 6y agoIn the article it shows the tweet isn't a bitcoin address, its just a link to another site which presumably has the actual scam.
- actuator 6y agoThe ones I saw from Musk, Buffett etc had the actual address.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- adriancooney 6y agoIt's absolutely crazy. This doesn't look like just leaked keys - it looks like genuine, manual access to accounts (as well as automated). The whole system must be compromised. @kanye replied to the scam tweet with "Sent out over $2,000,000!" [1]. [1]: https://i.imgur.com/wN7u43C.png https://i.imgur.com/wN7u43C.png
- golemiprague 6y agoThey were too busy censoring right wing tweets and Trump, maybe they should focus on their security, hire more engineers than political commissars. But then how would they fill up their diversity quotas? tough problem.
- khazhoux 6y agoI can't count the number of times people have asked here "How can Twitter possibly employ 4,000+ employees?". Well, I suppose we've learned 4K isn't even enough for good anti-abuse systems.
- Aperocky 6y agoUm why not enough and not too much? This alone doesn't say anything in regard to twitter's user count. This means twitter had omni backend tooling that have manual/programmatic admin level access to production database. This is a very bad idea, access to production tables should be through a controlled medium and always challenged.
- redisman 6y agoAny 20 person startup in cyber security-adjacent fields has thought more about this than Twitter? Jeez this is not a good look.
- blisseyGo 6y agoOn a serious note, does that 4000+ employees include the content moderators? If yes, then I can see why. If not, then I am not sure what that many employees is for.
- golergka 6y agoFor middle management to win their political games.
- madmulita 6y agoThey might be too busy renaming all their 'master' branches.