Weak Password Brings 'Happiness' to Twitter Hacker

From Wired Threat Level

"An 18-year-old hacker with a history of celebrity pranks has admitted to Monday's hijacking of multiple high-profile Twitter accounts, including President-Elect Barack Obama's, and the official feed for Fox News.

The hacker, who goes by the handle GMZ, told Threat Level on Tuesday he gained entry to Twitter's administrative control panel by pointing an automated password-guesser at a popular user's account. The user turned out to be a member of Twitter's support staff, who'd chosen the weak password "happiness."

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/professed-twitt.html

great stuff, twitter got for free what would have cost them 20k+ from any other pen test shop.

Defcon Thoughts

Everyone else (g0ne, ncircle, terminal23) is doing their thoughts on Defcon so I figured I would too. I've been waiting on a couple of people to actually post the code they talked about but I'm growing impatient and I guess I can use the release for other posts.

Let's start with the Cons:
-The Badges...oops that sucked...least not getting one when I first paid, the blinky lights were cool. At least mine worked this year.
-The stench...oops that stunk...like rotting corpse bad.
-The Goons...hmmm what to say...I know you have a tough job with crowd control and whatnot but do you really have to talk to everyone like they are assholes? I'm not sure you have a reason to be screaming at 11am Friday morning, save that shit for Sunday.
-The Crowds...sucks...that narrow ass hallway combined with the stench = no fun
-The Talks...I didn't care for most of the talks (maybe I just picked bad), of course there were a few good ones, but props to everyone that submitted a paper and stood up there in front of a ton of people. I think the boss is convinced to do BH next year, everyone I talked to that went to BH was pleased with the talks.

The Pros:
-The Parties...303, hackerpimps, securabit/i-hacker, offensive computing, freakshow, i-sight, core impact, etc
-The People...not the crowds but getting to meet in person people I talk to online all the time...regrets...not making it to the security twits meetup.
-The CTF...I had people explain a to me a little better than last year what the hell is actually going on. Pretty interesting.
-The Guitar Hero competition...fun!
-The Swag...my green/black defcon coffee cup rulez.
-The Twitter(ing)...very cool watch the twits in real time during talks...mvp to jjx for most tweets or twits or whatever they are called.

I'll do a separate post on the talks I thought stood out at Defcon.