What Twitter's Worst Hack Means For Its Bottom Line

Considering the fact that Twitter Inc. was still in damage-control mode Thursday from what was arguably the worst security failure in its history, it was a little surprising that investors didn't seem to care all that much, with its stock price barely down in afternoon trading. The market’s initial assessment seems to be that the social media platform’s users will take the breach in stride and return to the service — which does seem to have been the case so far.

But even if Twitter’s user growth is relatively unaffected, shareholders shouldn’t overlook what the latest in a long series of security incidents says about the how the company works and why its stock has been such a disappointment: Twitter’s engineering prowess and management practices are simply second-rate.

Wednesday evening’s response to the attack gave further evidence of the structural issues. While the company said it “immediately” took down the posts and locked affected accounts when it found out about the hack, my observations point to a slower response. I directly saw how scam messages with the same Bitcoin address continued to spread for more than an hour to different accounts, and how posts stayed up for some time before being deleted. It made me wonder why Twitter couldn’t move faster in automatically deleting any message posted with this specific cryptocurrency address, and suggested a lack of security defense capabilities.