Something interesting has been going on with Twitter; a problem surfaced and started spreading across the Twitterverse … tweets went missing !

Although this problem occurred before, it happened within a limited scale and people didn’t end up losing thousands upon thousands of tweets.

What if the hackers from the DDoS, from two weeks ago, left a little gift on the Twitter server? So while Twitter was busy trying to plug the security hole in their system and thriving to better protect it from another DDoS attack they overlooked a “Time Bomb” that is eating up people’s tweets and spreading throughout the system.

Not this time at least…

While that wasn’t the case this time but we still had an angry mob of tweeps demanding their pound of flesh or their tweets, and it has already been a week and Twitter hasn’t resolved the problem fully. Earlier on this year, we had a very promising service suffer a very unfortunate demise, Ma.gnolia lost its users data and its users along with causing a lot of people to question their faith in the cloud and fog up their visions of a fluffy future.

Is Twitter next ? Or is it just too big to fail?

As the corporate and mainstream begin their seismic migration to cloud computing platforms we will see more and more attacks of this nature. Are we going “all in” on the wrong hand ?

So what are they (not) doing ?

As we move more of our information and our lives into the cloud, how can we guarantee that our data is provided with the proper level of protection? Usually, in the corporate world, when you get into a third party agreement with a company to provide a service one of the clauses is usually the right to audit the service and that’s how you can guarantee its quality. In this case, do we even have the right to audit a service like Twitter or Facebook or even Google? Given the fact that they are free services and you sign to their terms when you accept the EULA you play according to their rules, which might not be to your benefits!

Currently as it stands, even the biggest names in business are lousy when it comes to adopting web and security standards that aim to protect their businesses, and consequently their customer base. While major technology companies such as IBM and Cisco have established an open cloud computing manifesto to help introduce more standard security and monitoring to the Internet,  major web companies such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and Amazon refused to even participate. Their attitude towards privacy seems entrenched in opposition to it, and they design accordingly because its to their benefit to establish a low bar for privacy. Look at what Facebook did by making message public by default even when you have set your profile to be otherwise.

Voice your concern!

Until the customers become aware that their privacy and security has been short handed to minimize overheads and until they start actively voicing their concerns, those companies will not shape up! As we become more dependent on those technologies the consequences of such over sights could be dire, because as it stands now: cloud computing is in the cross-hair of cyber-attackers.

It was Twitter last week, now it’s FaceBook and next week it will be another service that gets attacked and goes down.  So what are the steps they are taking, or not taking, to secure our data? What will happen the next time a server is compromised and an attack blind sights them? Not being known for your reliability doesn’t help you either. So what would you do if you were the next Cyxymu?

Too many questions and sadly the situation indicates that the answers won’t be provided until it’s a little too late. Maybe we should turn the noise up a notch, so “what are you doing ?“

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