"We are sharing this information to help people make an informed decision about their account security. We didn’t have to, but believe it’s the right thing to do."
The "we didn't have to" is a little jarring given the scale of this.
I know I wouldn't trust my password with the number of people that have easy access to logs at other large(ish) tech companies.
I really can't imagine why "we didn't have to" was included in that tweet, at all. What other flaps like this have occurred that exposed my creds or personal data to large numbers of employees, that they didn't have and didn't choose to tell us about?
Ideally, you'd only need to read raw logs tied to a test account, or, maybe your own personal accounts.
Stack traces and exceptions and the like can be anonymized and collated.
Maybe I miss the point behind this comparison? I guess I'd understand more if I thought the number of folks with node access and log access were in the same magnitude at Twitter, or if the TLS stack persisted data over time.
Nothing is known to have ever left Twitter's servers.
FTFY.
The fact it didn’t leave Twitter doesn’t mean everything is good. There are still a LOT of people who may have had some kind of access to this data.
The fact that they undeleted it is strong evidence that he didn't have discretion in how he performed his job, and thus was actually an employee and not a contractor.
How come? I interpreted it to mean that no regulations required this, but they chose to anyway. Which is true.
I think the tone matters. Particularly for matters like this.
To my ear (and many who replied to that Tweet) this reads as "we've decided to do you a favor." Which is very much not the case.
Compare that to Github who just yesterday went through the exact same problem, except they're requiring users change their password. Their CTO didn't make some 'hey you should THANK US" claim.
> During the course of regular auditing, GitHub discovered that a recently introduced bug exposed a small number of users’ passwords to our internal logging system, including yours. We have corrected this, but you'll need to reset your password to regain access to your account.
> GitHub stores user passwords with secure cryptographic hashes (bcrypt). However, this recently introduced bug resulted in our secure internal logs recording plaintext user passwords when users initiated a password reset. Rest assured, these passwords were not accessible to the public or other GitHub users at any time. Additionally, they were not accessible to the majority of GitHub staff and we have determined that it is very unlikely that any GitHub staff accessed these logs. GitHub does not intentionally store passwords in plaintext format. Instead, we use modern cryptographic methods to ensure passwords are stored securely in production. To note, GitHub has not been hacked or compromised in any way.
Personally, I'd probably just say "We felt that we had to disclose this to protect the interests of our users" (and not acknowledge that they might not, or that they had to make a decision to do so), or just say what they _are_ doing ("We are disclosing this in order to protect our users") and avoid the possibility that it is misinterpreted. I don't think there is anything to be gained by saying that they might not have done this.