It’s amazing to think about how mismanaged twitter must really be. Folks like John, Ben and I use it all day long and somehow the platform itself hasn’t evolved at all in recent years. Really can you think of a time when twitter meaningfully improved anything? This source puts the total number of twitter employees at 4,900 at the end of last year. How is that even possible.
Really makes me continue to feel like I made the right choice to avoid big companies for my entire career. How is it that places like Happy Cog feel slow to me yet the amount of work thats launched at happy cog is seamingly 100x that of twitter with a fraction of the employees (60 at my last count)
Reading The NY Times story on the hack makes it clear that this was the work of a bunch of bored kids. Exactly the kinds of kids that I worry about Orlando turning into. They did it for the the “lulz”. And because they wanted what they call OG user names things like @a which are apparently worth a lot of money on places like OGusers.com.
I first heard about this behavior in an episode of radiolab or was it Reply all? Ahh yes, its called “The Snapchat Thief” and it was on reply all.
For online gamers, Twitter users and hackers, so-called O.G. user names — usually a short word or even a number — are hotly desired. These eye-catching handles are often snapped up by early adopters of a new online platform, the “original gangsters” of a fresh app.
“i just kinda found it cool having a username that other people would want,” “ever so anxious” said in a chat with The Times.
The craziest detail about this story that I wasn’t aware of was that they believe that they got the credentials to the internal system simply by asking for them in a company slack group. This seems completely believable to me, we do this all the time at Happy Cog. Without even asking just searching the logs you can get passwords to all kinds of happy cog systems. Luckily most of our passwords are only in 1password but everyone gets sloppy sometimes including me. That means all they would have to do to get access to everything is to get access to slack which is a much easier target.