Cybersecurity professionals broadly agree on a central problem: Computers and code have clear fixes, but humans don't.
Twitter provided perhaps the highest-profile example of this challenge when its security was breached Wednesday, allowing for scam-filled messages to be sent from some of the most followed people on the platform, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West and Elon Musk.
Specifics of how the attack happened are still unconfirmed, but Twitter announced Wednesday night that it suspected "a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools."
Put more simply, Twitter didn't break. An employee did. Or more than one.
"Humans and their behaviour continue to be the biggest threat for organizations," said Mikko Hyppönen, the chief research officer at the Finnish cybersecurity company F-Secure.
"Security holes come and go. Sometimes there's something urgent happening but once you patch and update, you're good to go," he said by text message. "The human weaknesses are there always. Every day. Forever."
Twitter worked to contain the damage, but it took several hours, including a period in which it prevented most verified users from posting new tweets. (Verified users, known for their check marks, tend to be prominent figures in politics, the media, business and culture.) During that time, scam tweets were sent from dozens of major accounts, as well as hundreds of unverified accounts. The hackers q ..
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