This week has seen its share of security breaches. We heard about “no-log” VPN providers leaking personal info the other day. Earlier in the week, Twitter had its own incident. The latest hack may have only affected 130 users, but it did include some pretty well-known people. Famous users such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, former President Barack Obama, presidential candidate Joe Biden, and Kanye West were among the accounts that were compromised. The full damage from the “coordinated social engineering attack” is still unknown.
In the wake of this latest breach, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is calling on the popular messaging platform to adopt end-to-end encryption. In particular, it wants it applied to Twitter’s direct-messaging service. It also said that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had claimed it was “in the works” two years ago in response to U.S. Senator Ron Wyden. Once again, he, too, is asking Twitter to implement this change. The EFF had this to say in its recent story on the matter.
…it’s Twitter’s responsibility to provide robust internal safeguards. Even with Twitter’s strong security team, it is almost impossible to defend against all insider threats and social engineering attacks…
Twitter is becoming a loner among the social media crowd by not applying E2E to its direct messages. Many companies have already incorporated some form of E2E to their platforms. End-to-end encryption is not a one-size-fits-all approach, as explained in this article from Wired. EFF does state that if Twitter had adopted E2E, the latest breach might not have happened.