What Twitter’s 200 Million-User Email Leak Actually Means
WiredAPR 2023
Now that the dust has settled, it is clearly outrageous that a handful of teenagers were able to paralyze one of the world's biggest social media platforms with hardly any resistance. One can only imagine what a nation-state or more sophisticated group would be capable of pulling off. This is one of many cybersecurity incidents to have affected the platform, and it remains to be seen if Twitter has learned its lesson from this debacle and improved its security.
What befell Twitter has little to do with the security of the platform itself, as it was a social engineering attack that was ultimately responsible. This was not a breach that relied on computer exploits but instead on the fallible employees behind the keyboard. There is no firewall that can defend against human error; everyone ought to be more aware of social engineering as a serious cybersecurity threat.