Web Scrape of Buried Twitter Financials Technically Amounts to a Hack

Financial-intelligence firm Selerity took credit for publishing Twitter's earnings announcement before NASDAQ's closing bell. It says it didn't hack anybody to find it either. Web-crawling bots run by the company uncovered the financial report – an abysmal $162 million first-quarter loss -- buried deep in Twitter's public investor relations page.

The results were grabbed through an automated process of refreshing Twitter's investor relations page, where the financials appeared for 45 seconds.

"No leak. no hack," Selerity tweeted. 

Andrew Brook, Selerity's CTO, said the company struck gold about 68 minutes after its bots began refreshing the Twitter investor relations page. He said the page was refreshed "every few seconds."

"Finding that document," Brook said, "was not very hard."

The incident brings to mind the case of Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, who was criminally prosecuted on hacking charges for obtaining and disclosing the personal data of iPad owners located on a publicly-available AT&T website.

Auernheimer's attorney, Orin Kerr, had argued unsuccessfully that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was being construed too broadly against his client.

So did Selerity's actions amount to hacking as defined by the government’s theory of hacking in Auernheimer's case?

"Yes, sounds like it," Kerr, a former federal prosecutor, told Ars in an e-mail