Hive Social Turns Off Servers After Researchers Warn Hackers Can Access All Data (arstechnica.com) 73
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hive Social, a social media platform that has seen meteoric growth since Elon Musk took over Twitter, abruptly shut down its service on Wednesday after a security advisory warned the site was riddled with vulnerabilities that exposed all data stored in user accounts. "The issues we reported allow any attacker to access all data, including private posts, private messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages," the advisory, published on Wednesday by Berlin-based security collective Zerforschung, claimed. "This also includes private email addresses and phone numbers entered during login." The post went on to say that after the researchers privately reported the vulnerabilities last Saturday, many of the flaws they reported remained unpatched. They headlined their post "Warning: do not use Hive Social." Hive Social responded by pulling down its entire service. "The Hive team has become aware of security issues that affect the stability of our application and the safety of our users," company officials wrote. "Fixing these issues will require temporarily turning off our servers for a couple of days while we fix this for a better and safer experience."
Technical details are being withheld to prevent the active exploitation of them by malicious hackers. According to Business Insider, Hive Social's user base has doubled in the last few weeks, going from about 1 million to 2 million as of last week. The site is only being staffed by two people, "neither of whom had much of a background in security," reports Ars.
Technical details are being withheld to prevent the active exploitation of them by malicious hackers. According to Business Insider, Hive Social's user base has doubled in the last few weeks, going from about 1 million to 2 million as of last week. The site is only being staffed by two people, "neither of whom had much of a background in security," reports Ars.
Twitter Engineers (Score:3, Interesting)
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Because Hive Social probably can't pay them in the foreseeable future.
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Re: Twitter Engineers (Score:1)
To advocate that an authority (government or otherwise, I know the 1st amendment is for governments only, dont care) should be moderating their social
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As a giant "fuck you" to Musk? Yeah, I could even see that happen.
Re:Twitter Engineers (Score:4, Interesting)
But of course that makes it at least plausible to assume that some of them would work for free for a competitor just to spite Musk.
Though if they believe in Hive Social that much, I'm not sure.
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As a giant "fuck you" to Musk? Yeah, I could even see that happen.
Most people are not all-consumed by irrational hatred as you are.
Stop using your life as a platform of hate, use it to support the things you love and forget about what you hate.
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That isn't a fair characterization of what happened at Twitter. The staff had been massively expanded in recent years while the company had not... they hired a bunch of people they didn't need and Musk simply brought it back to those levels. He had no choice or the company wouldn't be able to make debt payments.
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Yes and fairly routine. Have you never heard of a layoff before?
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I do.
I love to hate people.
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Judging by the state this world is in, I guess that's true.
I mean, if you read his ad brochure, god comes across like a giant douche.
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> If they are idealistic enough to work for free for some time, maybe.
They got 90 days' severance pay.
Good enough for a well-organized sprint.
And then what? (Score:1, Insightful)
They got 90 days' severance pay.
Good enough for a well-organized sprint.
Yes, and then?
I'm not sure if you've looked for a job recently - especially a higher end tech job - but that takes time now, a lot of time with rounds of interviews.
If you have 90 days maybe you can take a month off to relax or do whatever, but you don't really have 90 days and then you start looking, unless you want to start eating into savings...
And with all the FAANG companies freezing hiring or dropping people, your choices are more
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My linkedin and email seem to say otherwise. I get no less than 8 invitations to interview for positions that would meet my minimum pay needs a month. Yes the FAANG companies are frozen for a bit, but there is a huge vacuum of talent in the rest of the market. My last round of interviews (which was less than 4 months ago) took 3 weeks to go from the recruiter reaching out to me on linkedin to a job offer acceptance. They know they have to move fast and they are.
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Twitter engineers? You've got that reversed, they collect a paycheck without working.
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I heard that there may be some experienced social media network engineers in the market for a career change. Just sayin'.
"The site is only being staffed by two people, "neither of whom had much of a background in security," reports Ars."
Remind me again why Twitter needed tens of thousands of employees...?
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How many people does it take to keep a database program that serves one liners?
Look at Ardupilot. Run by a handful of very talented people. Tridge, Randy...
When you look around at life, aren't the millions of aggregate projects going a collection of strong individual efforts?
Think about it, an experienced garbage man, a hunter... they're all proficient in what they do. Mike Rowe tried to point that out.
If you put two unmotivated unknowledgeable people in a position, they will fail like what happened. On the
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Can't imagine they are unmotivated (Score:1)
If you put two unmotivated unknowledgeable people in a position, they will fail like what happened.
I think that's a bit unfair to the Hive guys, I imagine they are actually highly motivated, just as you said unknowledgeable in terms of security.
However it sure seems like you'd have to be REALLY ignoring security to make it so that arbitrary calls from a user could look at any data in the system. Or maybe that was even by initial design, to be open??? Seems unlikely.
Anyway, I think the Hive guys at least d
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"The site is only being staffed by two people, "neither of whom had much of a background in security," reports Ars."
Remind me again why Twitter needed tens of thousands of employees...?
To pay for mostly female curators. The vast bulk of those fired were non-technical staff: HR, curators, account managers, etc. Some coders and sysadmins were pushed out, but they were a minority of those shown the door.
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The Lord stated that a woman's place is in the home....
Christ on a Crutch, you are fucking kidding me.
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I don't know about thousands, but the fact this happened to hive shows you need at least more than 2.
"Engineers" (Score:1)
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People have gone hysterical over way, way less. Remember when some boybands disbanded and teenagers committed suicide over it? This is just the grownup version thereof.
Re:Twitter hate (Score:5, Funny)
Remember when some boybands disbanded and teenagers committed suicide over it?
Ah, no, we don't. This is Slashdot, not TwilightMoms.
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I know, but I have a life outside this board.
And I enjoy reading about the stupidity of humanity.
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Good point. I was giving people too much credit.
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But do not understand all these knuckleheads
You do not understand because you refuse to understand, and you made that clear by insulting the class you claim to be trying to understand. You are boringly transparent.
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Look guys, I found the homophobic child who... er, that's half of this fucking site these days
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Supporting disrespecting manhood and womanhood
That's pretty funny, but it's not fact-based. Nobody should respect your vision of masculinity or femininity, both of which are toxic.
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And yet you fail to explain in any way why twitter matters or why these paragons of intelligence care about twitter or why anyone should care about twitter. All you did was reply to my pretty common and unremarkable take on this with your usual hate filled content free noise after modding me down with your sock puppets.
What was the phrase you taught me? Ah yes... you are boringly transparent.
Re:Twitter hate (Score:5, Informative)
But do not understand all these knuckleheads having a freak out at Elon taking over. So what?
Elon isn't even a real engineer. https://www.timesnownews.com/e... [timesnownews.com]
People liked twitter the way it was. Elon suddenly became a conservative the second his massive Tesla subsidies stopped. Then he became used to people never saying no to him. His goal was to "pwn the libs" or something so he decided to buy twitter without due diligence or. The impeding lawsuit would have forced him to buy twitter or pay a billion dollar penalty. All because he's a full time troll and can't keep his mouth shut. So he paid $44 billion for a company that's really valued at $10 billion. So now he's stuck. What's the first thing he does? Make people pay $8 for a check. The only problem is they don't verify identity so anyone can buy a blue check that says anything. People parody him and he bans their accounts (after saying free speech and comedy is back on twitter). So that goes away and eventually verified checks are back but now color coded for the various types. In the meantime half the advertisers fled https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25... [npr.org] because Coca Cola doesn't enjoy seeing their ads next to people posting swastikas https://news.sky.com/story/kan... [sky.com]
Elon tells twitter staff that now to be part of the "new twitter" they are expected to work 80 hours per week. https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com] Again this comes from someone who has never heard the word NO in a very long time. So you can imagine how many people said give me the 3 months salary I'm outta here. That's just off the top of my head. Elon is slowly finding out all of twitters old policies were there for a reason. Not removing nazi propaganda posts would get twitter banned in the EU pretty fast.
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Some people liked Twitter the way it was, namely the twin coast so called "liberals" and "cool kids" who ran around verified, able to shut down any ideas they didn't like. Ironic given your sig about Hunter Biden's laptop that you can't see why that was a problem. Imagine if in 1971 Twitter existed and decide to remove the Washington Post for publishing the Pentagon Papers b/c the White
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I wouldn't be surprised if many of the advertisers left because they lost their account manager at Twitter.
The advertisers left because corporations are mostly cowards that fold easily when people on the coasts whine about something.
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Limbaugh was a grifter plain and simple. He found a niche and milked it selling shitty merchandise along the way. People didn’t listen because of what he would say next. They listened because he confirmed their bias. Is it really that difficult to predict what Limbaugh would say? Let me take a wild guess, he repeats republican talking points? People listened to Howard Stern because they wanted to hear what he said next.
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They listened because he confirmed their bias.
I've heard people who love him and hate him talk about him. I don't think I would call that confirming bias.
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Advertisers go where they get the most value for their money. This is why nobody will pay to advertise deep in the forest behind my house. The woke advertising movement isn't because they are folding, it's because they believe the virtue signaling will get them more customers. This is capitalism 101.
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What is “woke” about seeing your brand next to a post advocating what a misunderstood guy Hitler was? That’s common sense.
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I used woke as the term used by the people who think these companies are caving to appease the left. In reality if there was more money to be made posting your product with a picture of Hitler you need to realize the Nike Nazi edition would be out by Monday. Companies go where the money is.
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Yeah Gillette really went where the money is when they insulted their customers with their woke advertising. Oh wait....
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Not to mention it's not like every company makes perfect decisions. Market research can often be wrong.
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What an odd insult. Like no democrats or people who lean left live in the middle of the country.
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>Half the advertisers fled, b/c we're in a recession and everybody is cutting costs
You are delusional if you believe that this is the reason. They left because of the uncertainties at Twitter, and that it is now perceived as toxic. Besides, apparently they don't like their products advertised next to Nazi propaganda.
Re:Twitter hate (Score:5, Insightful)
However, just staying like it was wasn't sustainable. It wasn't making money. Well, OK during the Covid boom it sporadically made a little money [statista.com], but was losing money again in its last quarter as a public company. Even factoring in this horrible past year for most online companies, twitter's history of profits was 100% in no way comparable to those of facebook [statista.com], for example (twitter's profits would look like a flat line along the x axis of the facebook graph).
So, twitter isn't quite the same as the dinosaurs doing fine and getting hit by an asteroid for no reason at all. More like a wounded caribou leaving a trail of blood for the wolves.
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But do not understand all these knuckleheads having a freak out at Elon taking over. So what?
People liked twitter the way it was.
YOUR tribe may have liked it the way it was. There were a pretty large number of people that didn't. Curation was done by a cadre of Mean Girls that would ban and shadowban arbitrarily. Bot activity was allowed if it suited the Mean Girls' politics. And Jack was too cowed by his own employees to do anything about. I prefer Twitter being chaotic to it being the bitchy, airtight bubble that it was. Musk may end up losing a ton of money on this, but he did the world a service sending those people packing.
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The people who don’t like twitter now have their own echo chamber so everyone should be happy. I never used twitter but I don’t begrudge anyone else who enjoys it.
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Some people liked twitter. Elon suddenly seemed to became a conservative when the left swung way leftward and went batshit crazy.
FTFY.
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Oh the left moved? You want to discuss some of Ronald Reagan’s policies and see where they sit on the current republican scale?
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Ok, I pretty much agree with everything you said.
But... so what? Twitter is a shitty sms-on-my-browser-and-app platform (with ads) with near zero redeeming qualities.
What good has twitter brought to humanity that wasn't already available in some other way? Nothing i can think of and certainly nothing worth the echo chambers of hate the site has spawned and/or given home to.
So, again, why are all these knuckleheads exploding over Elon owning Twitter? Why care? He hasn't even done anything of note with it
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Even if their worst fears come true and a bunch of racists move back and post whatever, so what? They're not forced to see any of it and can load up any of the many privately curated safe space block lists that's been around for years.
I think that racists on twitter, and concomitant normalizing of hate and racism, will make society worse for quite a lot of people who are less well off than myself. The fact that I'm not forced to see it and have other safe spaces is true, but unrelated to my motives...
I care primarily about those less well off than myself. If some mechanism comes along to make society systematically worse for them to live in, I don't want it. Others who believe this are motivated by Matthew 25:40-45 "whatever you did not
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I care primarily about those less well off than myself.
Therein lies your folly. This is murrica.
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I think twitter itself makes society worse. You want a better society? Shut down twitter (and social media in general) down entirely.
The bad vastly outweighs the good at all of these companies.
Twitter, Facebook, instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and so on, shut down every site and all their clones if you want a better society. There is no way to "run them better" in a good for society sense.
So what makes these "hackers" so special? (Score:1)
Nothing? Nothing at all?
Then stop pretending they're special. Just admit anyone can access all data. And yes, that's plenty big enough to shut everything down.
Next question: Why did nobody notice this before?
Bold Action (Score:5, Insightful)
Good for them - many would try to hide it and limp along. Kudos for taking bold action.
It's interesting that The Hive is aptly named for the kind of users they're trying to attract; the mental model of humans being in a bee hive is often used by those who eschew individualism.
The Internet done right has people of certain types finding each other and leaving the rest alone whenever possible.
Tech Bloat. (Score:1)
"Hive Social, a social media platform that has seen meteoric growth since Elon Musk took over Twitter...is only being staffed by two people..."
For anyone who might still view Elon stepping in and firing thousands upon thousands of Twitter employees as horrifically evil, keep in mind a rising competitor was chugging along with two fucking people.
Even the bloated .bomb company looks like a svelte Olympian compared to that kind of corporate obesity.