Twitter to Invest in Resources for Two-factor Authentication

After suffering a breach last week that impacted some 250,000 accounts, Twitter is looking to bolster security by investing in two-factor authentication. The news comes by way of a job posting, where the micro-blogging site has asked security developers to come forward.

Last week, Twitter said that it was hit by a sophisticated cyberattack. According to the company, their investigation indicated that the attackers had limited access to usernames, email addresses, session tokens, and salted password hashes for up to 250,000 users.

“This week, we detected unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process moments later,” Twitter noted in a blog post.

“This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.”

While Twitter’s internal security seems to have mitigated the incident and prevented things from getting out of control, a recent job posting suggests that they want to do more.

Asking for those who like to code and like security, Twitters job opening announcement seeks members for their product security team. The position will see the new-hires assess and write critical security code, and develop new approaches for detecting and preventing vulnerabilities. However, it is the note that the job also includes the design and development of “user-facing security features, such as multifactor authentication and fraudulent login detection” that has many talking.

Should Twitter enable two-factor authentication, they will join the ranks of Google and Dropbox, as each company enabled such protections as a response to criminals targeting their users. “As far as Twitter’s anticipated move goes, it would be nice if the company did it in a consistent, bolted-down way, instead of taking missteps as many other companies have. If Twitter does manage to do it right, big brand names would be wise to adopt two-factor authentication as soon as it’s available,” commented Sophos’ Lisa Vaas.

For those interested, Twitter’s job posting is here.