On Dec. 17, Twitter was hacked and defaced by a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army. The site was down for an extended period. Twitter eventually recovered, but it is now recommending that if you use the same password on Twitter as you use on other Web sites, now would be a great time to change all of them.
There are two concerns here. First, that Twitter is so easily hackable. Quoth TechCrunch:
Twitter does not have the best record with security issues. We have previously covered a number of incidents, and as recently as two months ago their web servers were misconfigured to reveal detailed internal network information. We also previously wrote about their admin interface having a password of ‘password’ on one account, and the well-known Twitter doc incident.
The second issue is that Twitter is now a political target, especially for Iran. Lest we forget, Twitter was the social media tool of choice for organizers of Iranian election protests this year — a fact that Iran didn’t care for and hasn’t forgotten. Thus Twitter (and any high-profile social site that allows for like-minded activists to connect) is now a big, tempting target for hacktivist counterattacks.
Your data is now considered collateral damage — or at least an acceptable casualty — of these cyberattacks. If I were you, I’d have a backup somewhere.
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- Twitter ‘hijacked’ by Iranian protesters (guardian.co.uk)
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- Twitter, Iranian Reformer Sites Hacked by ‘Iranian Cyber Army’ (blogs.wsj.com)
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There is another great tool that online users should use, it is called Last Pass. It is very easy to use and generates a random password for each site you go to, so if one site, such as Twitter, is compromised you do not have to worry about someone using the same password on another account.
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