Last month, Twitter blocked people from posting links to an article that detailed the activities of Hunter Biden, the son of Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, published by the New York Post.
The company claimed at the time that this was because of its policy on hacked materials – though there was no indication that the material published by the Post had been obtained through surreptitious means.
In the case of Kottmann, Deloitte had a site set up with the name "Test Your Hacker IQ" which anyone could use, after entering a username. The domain was deloittehackeriq.com.
{laodposition sam08}Kottmann, whose Twitter handle is deletespace, found that the site's YAML configuration was open to world+dog – and within it lay the credentials for accessing the MySQL database used for the site.
A screenshot of the deloittehackeriq.com which was taken down on Wednesday.
According to the The Register, the site had a number of multiple-choice queries none of which touched on the issue of publicly exposing passwords.
Like any sane person would, Kottmann posted a picture of Deloitte's faux pas on his Twitter account.
But Twitter, which now seems to be operating as the official censor for many companies, promptly took his account down. The company announced with much fanfare a few days after the Hunter Biden story fiasco that it was changing its policy on hacked materials.
Tillie Kottmann's Twitter accounts was suspended for taking the sensible option.
The Register also pointed out that Deloitte site was hosted on Ubuntu Linux 14.04 — version 20.10 was released recently — which is no longer supported by Canonical, the company that puts out the distribution, and that there are 11 possible exploitable flaws in the system.
The deloittehackeriq.com domain was registered in 2015 by Tank Design, a digital marketing company in Massachusetts, the Reg said, adding that it had a 2015 Deloitte Development LLC copyright notice.
Perhaps companies like Deloitte, which market themselves as being "driven to create an impact that matters at every opportunity" should not meddle in things that are meant for adults. There are limits to marketing, you know.
