Twitter’s user numbers might be growing super-fast, but so is its reputation for hacked user accounts!
The latest Twitter account hack, (which is about an hour old as I write this), is sending the following message; “hey! 23/Female. Come chat with me on my webcam thingy here..“ with a link to a porn site – from the hacked user’s account.
Twitter hacked again?
It’s uncertain yet, whether Twitter itself has been compromised or if it’s yet another example of a third party website being hacked. I’m guessing it’s the latter.
Because of Twitter’s lack of functionality, there’s a huge number of websites offering Twitter related services. Many of these third party websites require the user to give their Twitter user name AND password in order to use the service. Amazingly, users seem only too keen to give their account details to these often unknown providers.
If your Twitter account has been compromised, I recommend you change your password and then delete the offending message/s. You can contact me on Twitter here.
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The bigger twitter gets the harder it is to use without 3rd party apps. My account was screwed in January when a website I used was hacked into. I stopped using twitter and wont go back until it works without having to risk using unauthorized providers.
Has anyone stopped to think about HOW Twitter accounts are being compromised? Let’s think about all of the services out there that allegedly help make Twitter better. You openly type in your password and username into the fields and start tinkering away, not even thinking about the fact that you’re whoring your Twitter account info all over the internet. What’s to say at least ONE of those websites isn’t a scam, deployed only to farm Twitter accounts for sinister uses?
If it was designed to use an API key on a client by client basis like most other applications (Flickr and Remember the Milk for example), then it wouldn’t be an issue. Having 3rd party apps use your username and password is just asking for all kinds of trouble.
Ted and I are on the same page here. An API key would definitely make things a lot more secure. I think that’s a great idea and I’m sure it’s going to become apparent to the Twitter team that it needs to be considered. The amount of third party Twitter apps out is growing by the minute. Even if they’re not sinister, there’s still the chance that poor security on a third party’s system can compromise your account as well. The deeper you go into third party app use, the more intertwined the web of possibilities becomes.
Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (MySpace would be second and Facebook would be the largest in the world), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.
This is really a big problem as when once a website I used was hacked into and It was a big problem.
We need a good technological solution for this mess!
That is why