A More Serious Twitter Breach

When hackers on Tuesday exploited a security flaw on the social-networking service Twitter to corrupt messages from users -- including the White House press secretary's account -- the breach seemed to be a joke rather than an effort to bring down systems.

No one appeared to take the threat seriously at first, perhaps because they didn't know what was happening. How are Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and other federal employees supposed to know the difference between a malicious attack and a prank? And what are they supposed to do in response?

The bogus posts, or Tweets, that Gibbs unknowingly distributed to everyone subscribed to his updates -- his followers -- consisted of illogical letters, symbols and numbers.

During a press briefing, he said, "I thought I'd done something horrific to my own computer and quickly made sure I didn't spill anything on my keyboard or -- because at one point on my computer it just had people's names on Twitter and then all of their . . . message was blacked out as if the whole thing was redacted. I thought that was -- at first I thought that was somebody's message and I thought, I don't know what that means, but that's kind of funny. But then I realized it was happening to half my messages."

A reporter asked Gibbs, "But why doesn't that [hack] concern you, that there might be some sort of security breach in the messages that you're disseminating from the White House, that this could be scrambled or misinterpreted or redirected in some way?"

His response: "Well, again, since the words didn't equal -- since the combination of letters and numbers didn't actually equal a message, I'm not worried about that code being misinterpreted."

What if Twitter or Facebook, also widely used in government, starts rapidly spreading a virus that wipes out devices -- and, again, no one knows what's happening?

The reaction throughout the Twittersphere on Tuesday lends some hope that the social sector will come to the rescue. The Twitter website and Tweets from affected users quickly informed the noninfected that something odd was happening and that the company was working to patch the bug. So, at the same time that the social service was spreading gibberish and, reportedly, porn, it also was spreading helpful information.