Potential Big Changes at Twitter
Popular micro-blogging site Twitter wants to add some fresh faces to its team so it announced plans to hire 27 new people. The jobs range from software engineer to data analyst, but that’s not the interesting part. What’s interesting is the sheer number of people Twitter wants to hire. Now 27 may not seem like a big number, but Twitter is quite a small company. At this time there are about 120 people working for the micro-blogging site, making an increase of 27 new employees quite significant (roughly a 20% increase).
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced that the company will focus on revenues in 2010. This makes us think that the 27 new employees will be brought in to help the company make the big bucks. And if Twitter wants to make the big bucks, it will have to make existing features better as well as come up with new, attractive features.
Some of the new employees will be working for Twitter’s security team. Which is a good thing because Twitter took a big blow this December when a group of hackers calling themselves the Iranian Cyber Army managed to hijack Twitter’s DNS and direct traffic away from the micro-blogging site. For those of you that do not know what DNS is and how it works, here’s the lowdown: DNS (Domain Name System) converts readable site names like site.com into a sequence of numbers that the internet uses to direct users to a particular site. By changing the DNS, when someone types site.com he is directed to anothersite.com instead of site.com.
Hopefully Twitter’s new blood will stop things like this from happening again. The Iranian Cyber Army doesn’t seem to be stopping and they may hit again. Recently they managed to hijack the DNS of Baidu, China’s number one search engine. What the Iranian Cyber Army did not anticipate is that the attack on Baidu would upset Chinese hackers, who decided to mount their own attack on Iranian high profile sites – you know, as retaliation.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced that the company will focus on revenues in 2010. This makes us think that the 27 new employees will be brought in to help the company make the big bucks. And if Twitter wants to make the big bucks, it will have to make existing features better as well as come up with new, attractive features.
Some of the new employees will be working for Twitter’s security team. Which is a good thing because Twitter took a big blow this December when a group of hackers calling themselves the Iranian Cyber Army managed to hijack Twitter’s DNS and direct traffic away from the micro-blogging site. For those of you that do not know what DNS is and how it works, here’s the lowdown: DNS (Domain Name System) converts readable site names like site.com into a sequence of numbers that the internet uses to direct users to a particular site. By changing the DNS, when someone types site.com he is directed to anothersite.com instead of site.com.
Hopefully Twitter’s new blood will stop things like this from happening again. The Iranian Cyber Army doesn’t seem to be stopping and they may hit again. Recently they managed to hijack the DNS of Baidu, China’s number one search engine. What the Iranian Cyber Army did not anticipate is that the attack on Baidu would upset Chinese hackers, who decided to mount their own attack on Iranian high profile sites – you know, as retaliation.
