Tweetsteria: Everyone's Panicked Over Twitter Executive's E-mail Hack

By now, most of the industrialized world knows about the hack of a Twitter executive's e-mail account and the subsequent leak of sensitive data to Tech Crunch.

This same scenario reminds us all of the 2008 hacking of then-vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account. That security breach wasn't the result of some slick, Hollywood-style-super-spy-tech hacking. It was a kid who correctly guessed a password.

Bloggers and the media are fixated right now on this Twitter hack. One blogger even made an asinine leap in logic as to somehow attribute the Twitter executive's e-mail hack to a security flaw in Google Apps, simply because the e-mail account contained documents created in Google Apps:

The hacker who broke Twitter's rather feeble security last month was able to find and copy confidential documents because they were shared between Twitter employees using Google's Web apps.

This is not some inherent flow within Google Apps. This is a flaw of weak passwords. Just about all of the big-name platforms out there are guilty of it -- Hotmail, Gmail, Twitter. These sites are designed for the masses and the companies are often lax with providing proper password policies. The reasoning behind it could be that the companies do not want to turn off Jane and Joe Average User by making him or her adhere to password complexity policies.

Even The New York Times jumped on the bandwagon, bringing readers this astounding tidbit of technical sagacity:

... it also means that the security is only as good as the password.

Even the most wet-behind-the-ears network administrator would know to enforce a strong password policy in a corporate network.

So what will come of this latest "hack?" Most probably companies like Twitter and Gmail will shore up password security. Implement mandatory password changes. Require alphanumeric complexity the same way many online financial institutions do.

In the meantime, everyone needs to relax. The real hand-wringing security issues out there include deliberate attacks against government networks, the countless numbers of bots out there designed to drop Trojans that can steal information from our machines, and attempts to bring down critical infrastructures through cyberterrorism like we saw with the attack on the electric grid.

In the meantime, Microsoft, Google, Twitter and the like know what needs to be done and it's easily remedied: Shore up those password policies.