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
Personally identifiable information (PII) is any set of data that has a chance to uniquely identify a person, including name, address, credit card info, social security, etc. It can also include things like birthdate, city, IP address, and so on, depending on how the combination of data works. The general rule of thumb is that you want to aggregate out to the city level at least, or completely anonymize the data. These, I’m supposing, we’re raw records that contained account info.
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