The Twitter ‘God Mode’ admin panel, which was used by hackers to post Bitcoin scam messages and read people’s direct private messages, was available to more than 1,000 people working for the company, including outside contractors from a company called Cognizant, according to a report Reuters.
For its part, Twitter has declined to comment on the figure. The sources Reuters He spoke to said that Twitter had improved by restricting and monitoring access to this admin panel after a scandal last year in which two former Twitter employees were caught spying on Saudi dissidents on behalf of the Kingdom’s law enforcement.
Court documents filed at that time They claim that the process of collecting this confidential information was “trivial”, demonstrating the susceptibility of social media companies to internal attacks.
External staff had access to Twitter’s ‘God Mode’ panel
Employees of IT contractor Cognizant reportedly also had access to the Twitter admin panel. The firm appeared in the news in late 2019 after an investigation by The edge that your staff works as contractors to Facebook content moderation team They were paid an almost minimal salary for moderating trauma-inducing content, including videos of suicide and animal abuse. Several security experts interviewed by Reuters It identified lower-paid external support staff as a potential source of security threats to companies like Twitter.
During Twitter’s recent earnings call, the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, apologized for the violation and said the company “was” behind schedule “on its security protocols.
“Last week was a really tough week for all of us on Twitter, and we felt terrible about the security incident that negatively affected the people we serve and their trust in us,” Dorsey said in prepared remarks in an earnings call. “Security does not have an end point. It is a constant iteration to stay ahead of the adversaries. We lag behind, both in our protections against our employees’ social engineering and in the restrictions on our internal tools. ”
Dorsey confirmed during the call that Twitter is cooperating with the FBI in its investigation of the violation.
Twitter reports soft gains, but audience jumps
Twitter reported during its earnings that it had a large increase in the number of daily active users (186 million, 34% more than in the second quarter of last year) but that revenue fell with sales 19% to $ 683 million a as Covid-19 wreaks havoc on the global economy.
Twitter ended the US trading day on Thursday, rising 4% to close at $ 38.44.
This story was produced in collaboration with our friends at Fork, a content platform focused on emerging technology at the intersection of business, economics and politics, from Asia to the world.
