When Twitter revealed that hackers accessed "limited information" of an estimated 250,000 of its users, the company didn't mention the likelihood that those affected were all early adopters.
Twitter, at approximately 500 million users, carefully said that, "only a very small percentage of our users were potentially affected by this attack."
Left out of that statement was the possibility that this includes U.S. President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Speaker of the House John Boehner.
"A 'very small percentage of our users' is extremely misleading," charged social media analytics PeerReach co-founder Nico Schoonderwoerd in a recent blog post.
"By correlating the reported hacks on Twitter it becomes obvious that only early-adopters are affected that subscribed to Twitter before 15 June 2007."
All the passwords that are fit to pinch
Schoonderwoerd noted that "it's not the least important accounts that have been affected."
In addition to top U.S. politicians, he pointed out that "@nytimes (yes, them), @reuters, @cnn and @foxnews are just a few that have possibly been compromised and need to reset their passwords."
Even Twitter creator Jack Dorsey appears on the PeerReach list.
According to the social media metrics website, it has 1,370 accounts with 1,000,000 followers or more, and 67 (5 percent) of them have been affected by the hacking attempt.
'Yes we can' to more security measures
Twitter, reportedly standing at a USD$9 billion valuation (UK£5.6 AUD$8.6), has been silent outside of its carefully worded blog post.
The company said that it revoked session tokens and reset passwords - on purpose this time - as a precautionary measure.
In the future, Twitter might be looking to implement two-factor authentication, as revealed by an open position on its website.
"Do you like to code? Do you like security? Have we got the perfect position for you!" says this well-timed Software Engineer - Product Security job posting.
The first bullet point reads: "Design and develop user-facing security features, such as multifactor authentication and fraudulent login detection."
Despite this publicly-viewable job posting, a Twitter representative told TechRadar, "on the subject of two factor verification, we don't have anything specific to share at this time."
Now that the increased security threats of late have reached Twitter and possibly top accounts including the President's, expect this job to be fast-tracked as "shovel ready."
Via Peer Reach
