Twitter Used As Security Awareness Media: “FiveWordSecurityHorrors”

Yesterday a new trend started on Twitter with the hashtag “FiveWordTechHorrors”. I don’t know exactly who started it and why but it became quickly relayed and populated by many people working in IT. Everybody started to report some horror stories of ideas in all IT domains (security, development, hardware, software, etc). It was really viral and, honestly, I had a good laugh while reading some of the posted facts. But, it quickly became impossible to follow due to the amount of incoming tweets.

And this morning, a new hashtag appeared derived from the original one: “FiveWordSecurityHorrors”. Based on the same principle but with more focus to information security: To describe a security fact within only five words. The traffic was much lower but very funny (of course) and interesting. Here are some of my best quotes:

• 0-day? We have firewalls!
• We trust our outsourcing partner.
• Our product stops all APTs
• Default rule is any<>any
• Forgotten password sent by e-mail
• I can always update later…
• We’re safe. We have firewalls.
• We’re safe, we’re PCI compliant !
• The $VENDOR said it’s possible!
• Security? Our supplier does that.
• Why would anyone attack us?
• Sql injections ? We got ssl !
• Firewall protects our web applications?
• Yay angelina nude dot exe
• Join my network on LinkedIn…
• We don’t need salted hashes
• Marketing had a great idea
• Developped own proprietary encryption algorithm
• It costs to much money.
• I rely on signature anti-virus
• We trust our employees, right?
• Security is the users’ responsibility
• Our website is hacker proof
• This buffer is big enough.
• Please click on the link!

In my opinion, this trending hashtag was a very good security awareness reminder for most of us. Only five words but so real! Just try to keep some of them in your mind. And this awareness campaign was provided for free by Twitter!