Update: 01/05/09: CNN has posted a little more information regarding this breach on their website, here’s a link.
What I am wondering is what in the world do you do w/ a Twitter account once you hack it? It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, I guess I just don’t see the value of hacking someone’s twitter account. Maybe someone can enlighten me on this? I would love to know if I am missing something, ha.
Twitter is growing in popularity though, I have seen a lot of folks picking it up as of late that I never thought I would see getting into this type of social networking, it’s here to stay that’s for sure.
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.
33 High Profile Twitter Users Accounts Hacked
I don’t know what I would do if my google account was hacked. My twitter, I could live with it being hacked.
My opinion might be different next year as twitter will probably full blown mainstream.
Yeah, everything I read about Twitter these days has to do w/ how huge they are going to be in the coming year. I have been rooting for these guys to do well, but they are going to have to have a business model. 🙂
Surely you can't be serious asking why someone would hack a twitter account? Let me think… oh, say I have a hinky against the neighborhood church over traffic sunday mornings… Hack the Pastors account and tweet porn links to his followers.. that'd probably fix the traffic for a few weeks, at least on Sunday. The rest of the week, traffic would be way up with reporters and all that.
How about tweeting a link to “the pictures of the last youth retreat” or car wash? Only, when the visitors come to my faked-to-look-exactly-like your church album page, they enter their user names and passwords, only to get an error message that the site is down, come back later. (Of course, my database has noted the details they've entered, I can take down my impostor site now. I have what I need, and can probably sell that data to someone.)
Twitter may be just silly content and nothing to be too concerned with, but security on these silly little sites is where the breaches are created that affect the bigger things. It's a good bet, if I can get the names of 50 church website users, I might be able to find several of those same usernames and passwords used at local bank branches. And I'm just a regular mom, imagine what a real criminal mind can come up with.