Twitter Hacked
January 8, 2009
Stumble it!This morning we discovered 33 Twitter accounts had been “hacked” including prominent Twitter-ers like Rick Sanchez and Barack Obama (who has not been Twittering since becoming the president elect due to transition issues). We immediately locked down the accounts and investigated the issue. Rick, Barack, and others are now back in control of their accounts.
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.
Scary to think that the best hackers are invisible… they just go in and get sensitive information and get out and you never know… I’m guessing these guys got caught because they posted things to those hacked accounts? The hackers did indeed post messages, including some fairly sardonic/satirical ones. Seems to be a pretty major security flaw in twitter though – it doesn’t sound like it was restricted to the 33 accounts mentioned, either.
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January 8th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Whoa,
Not good. Sometimes I think what can we do to protect ourselves from this. Hey this is the web. We’ve had hackers for some time now. It’s not going to go away soon.
The only long term thing I can think of is to keep ourselves informed and savvy enough to spot a hack. Prevention better than cure.
All the Best!
Regards,
Erwin Chua
Winning To Win With Erwin Chua – Internet Marketing Advice
January 14th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Sadly when something becomes popular there will always be idiots around who will try and hack into it for some reason or another.
January 14th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Wow that’s terrible!
January 23rd, 2009 at 2:35 pm
I can deduce one thing why people get hacked:
Poor qualtiy passwords
When an account is hacked it’s either an inside job (friend, coworker, identity thiefs, organisation has poor security features set)
or
the account uses a common password phrase.
February 10th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Hacking Obamas twitter was a pretty dumb move. I heard the guy didn’t make much off of it either.