It’s been a bad week for Twitter – over the weekend the community was attacked by a Phishing Scam attack and in the last 24 hours 33 high profile Twitter users had their accounts hacked. These accounts included President Elect Barack Obama, Rick Sanchez, Britney Spears and other high profile/celebrity Twitter users.
Twitter explained what happened in a post on their blog:
“The issue with these 33 accounts is different from the Phishing scam aimed at Twitter users this weekend. These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account when they can’t remember or get stuck. We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline. We’ll put them back only when they’re safe and secure.”
To be fair to Twitter – both this situation and the Phishing one were responded to quickly by Twitter however it does show that Twitter is increasingly being targeted by malicious attacks and should serve as a warning to those using Twitter to expect the unexpected. While there wasn’t anything that those who had their accounts hacked could have done to prevent this – do keep your password secret and regularly updated.
Twitter does seem to be moving towards a more secure system with an beta test of OAuth scheduled for later this month – but until it goes live (and even after it) be a little more alert than normal.
@Livecrunch
That is a lot of twitter accounts, there is more then 33 .
If you and I just put accounts together from what I heard:
Total:67 accounts that have been hacked.
And there is probably hundreds of them being hacked. Don’t know how people could that easily fall for the phishing websites?
But then again I do understand since 80% of people ask “What is twitter?”
@ufoclips
naughty behavior follows money -
@tascer
I look forward to continued updates from you. This post was short, sweet and most importantly , to the point and that is what I was after. When I am on Twitter, I enjoy the sense of community and certainly I happened to be on the other day when all the disruption began to occur. I would be greatly saddened if I could no longer connect with the special group of “friends” I have developed exclusively through Twitter.
Again, great post and right to the point of the subject being posted.
Most Sincerely,
Tanya Chadwick
@anarchyintheuk
wtf does ‘high profile account mean’?
The internet doesn’t have ‘high profile’, ‘low profile’, ‘important’, ‘matters’, it is a platform for everyone. Oh, Iforgot, leeches like to suck.
Any idiot who gets phished still lives in the money for FU land, I guess they are the cretins who still reply to the Nigerian scam, which first came out as a posted letter, then migrated to the web. No wonder spam still exists.
Hey, you cretins who get phished are better off leaving the internet, then the rest of us can get on with our lives. Spammers only bother to spam because morons respond.
Get caught by a phish, yep you really are a twat.
Twitter has suddenly caught fire, it is not Twitters responsibilty the ‘HIGH PROFILE 33′ users are morons
@powersitedesign
I just blogged on this
here, but I was wondering what in the world someone would do w/ a hacked
twitter account? What benefit is it to a hacker?
@Pakblogger
I thin twitter did a good job by notifying people.i received a blogspot link and never clicked it
@HectorMinaya
Twitter need to find a better way to feed add third-party apps info, they should take a page out of facebook’s book.
@revenuerobot
@Ted LePat “naughty behavior follows money ”
that is very well put…
@focusguys
I think anyone can be vulnerable from these attacks. From the way I see it, the best defense would be not to click on links which you think would compromise your log in details and more so, not to share your details with any site that request it. But the thing is there are many sites that has Twitter applications that requires you to share your twitter log in details like for example, Less Friends, its a cool application as it scans who’s following you or who’s not following you, but the thing is to use that application they need your log in details. I think periodically changing the passwords would help. And in fairness to Twitter, they immediately issued the warnings. and thank you to sites like this that open up more awareness for everyone!
@bradhart
@Patric Everyone is vulnerable to these sorts of attacks however deciding to stay away from links sent to you isn’t necessarily a good way to deal with your followers, especially if you have followers who send you a lot of directs. Simple browser security protocols kept me away from the phising sites with ease. Firefox is your friend.
@leoschmidt08
I think we are foolishly making ourselves vulnerable through the use of all of the 3rd party apps. Although I use a couple of them myself (i.e. TweetDeck), I still think it is giving access to someone else who might be less secure (than Twitter) or who might want to steal our login info.
The problem might not be completely on Twitter’s shoulders. It might be on us who are giving out our passwords the moment a new Twitter web app comes available.
@farrhad
Arrgh! This is pathetic…..33 influential people…..that bad
@mintblogger
I’m not surprised about Britney’s account being hacked, for others I’m wondering how it happened!
@hectorhenry17
ups that bad news but the question its how they get the passwords.
@lmaoTweets
While being a serious breach of security, it does provide for a bit of Twitter comic relief. I just launched lmaoTweets.com and the screen shots of some of the hacked accounts were pretty hilarious. Twitter Hall of Shame
@stephaniefoster
One thing people can get from Twitter passwords are passwords to try on other sites. Think how many people use the same login information over and over again.