Google account of Twitter employee hacked

Ok, so this is a “retweet” of PCWorlds article aboout how the google account of a Twitter employee(s) was hacked a while ago. Since you can access nearly all of your google accounts with a single login this caused quite a chain of events.  Not only was some of the individuals gmail accounts compromised but also google docs and The Business Insider has screenshots of some of the information that was compromised.   Now in the article they mention that no twitter accounts were compromised due to this breach only some twitter employees personal accounts.

Now this situation is something I talked about a long time ago when I first started using google apps and gmail.  I think google was trying to make a system to compete with Microsoft Office.  Having access to all your documents where ever there’s internet is very handy and only having to login once is even more convenient.   Now what is the price that is paid for this convenience?

Well as the Twitter employees found out the hard way, the price is that if your account becomes compromised then all the data you’ve put in this central access point becomes compromised as well.

Now in this case most of the blame has to go on the users that had weak passwords that could be brute forced.

My next question is what about OpenID?  The adoption of OpenID has slowed down a little bit I think the same idea applies to that technology as well. Whenever you have many resources available through one point of entry that makes that point of entry much more valuable as well as painful if compromised.

Just my thoughts on centralized access to all your information.  It’s just like someone stealing your physical computer.