Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Wednesday, 7th January 2009

Weak Password Brings “Happiness” to Twitter Hacker. The full story on the Twitter admin account hack. I bet there are a LOT of web applications out there that don’t track and rate-limit failed password attempts.

# 12:04 pm / hacking, passwords, security, twitter

Rate limiting with memcached

On Monday, several high profile “celebrity” Twitter accounts started spouting nonsense, the victims of stolen passwords. Wired has the full story—someone ran a dictionary attack against a Twitter staff member, discovered their password and used Twitter’s admin tools to reset the passwords on the accounts they wanted to steal.

[... 910 words]

Gaza OpenStreetMap Update. “We’re looking into purchasing satellite imagery for the north or the entirety of Gaza. There’s actually B/W imagery available from yesterday!”

# 11:10 pm / gaza, mapping, mikel-maron, openstreetmap, satellite