this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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It's effectively a case of "I left my house unlocked and unarmed while I went on vacation. No one broke in, so I don't see the point in door locks and alarm systems."
Twitter got very VERY lucky that the worst that happened was some outages.
They moved hyper sensitive user data in a moving truck. If anything had gone wrong they would've exposed millions of peoples sensitive data.
You are supposed to wipe the servers before you move them, you shouldn't be driving servers around on the highway while they are still chock full of peoples credit card info and shit.
What sensitive data does Twitter hold? Genuinely curious
We don't know what was on those servers, but it was apparently sensitive enough that the government redacted descriptions of the data in court filings.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/us-government-slams-musk-in-court-filing-describing-chaotic-environment-at-x/
Isn’t all of it encrypted though? Like I understand physical access to servers is generally bad, but you’d think once the the things are unplugged it would be difficult to access the data again without bypassing encryption. I’m not a software engineer though
I'm a security engineer, and encryption is great, but can be bypassed. Relying on encryption assumes it was implemented properly, that the system was shut down properly so all keys were flushed correctly, and the encryption algorithm doesn't have weaknesses.
Generally if somebody dedicated enough can acquire physical access to a system, they can probably find a way into it given the right resources. Did that happen here? Probably not. Could it have? Absolutely. That's why most enterprises or government hard drives are shredded rather than just relying on them being wiped or encrypted.
Encryption is part of the solution, but it's not automatically the complete solution.