12/20/2022

Billionaires Are a Security Threat

It doesn’t have to be this way

Elon Musk's acquisition of of Twitter is particularly hard to swallow because every report of internal chaos reminds us that we may have sacrificed the most promising mode of online communication invented in decades by failing to identify it for what it was back when we had the chance. Musk’s purchase should never have been possible in the first place because Twitter should never have been an asset.

It is "the public conversation layer of the internet," as founder Jack Dorsey once put it, and consequently has functioned as the de facto center of our global alert system through the pandemic. It is astonishing that it is even still possible for one person to own this. It's like owning email.

In the field of information security, there is a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you have left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. We have here a new analog, just as capable of wrecking systems and leaking data. Call it the "evil billionaire attack" if you'd like. The weapon is money, and more specifically, the likelihood that when the moment arrives you won't have enough of it to make a difference. The call is coming from inside the house.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.