Twitter is starting to become a big hub for all the latest news around the world – disasters and events crop up on Twitter before you hear about them on the news, because the media and people viewing the event get information out faster.
This has progressed to the point major news agencies go onto Twitter to check vast amount of tweets, in order to get perspective and understanding on a certain story.
With this new found information hub, Twitter can be a very dangerous tool in the wrong hands. We have witnessed the effects these past few weeks, with notable handles like NBC, Burger King and Associated Press all being hacked.
Twitter will now be bringing two step verification to the service, as many other services like Google and Facebook have already added. This is not the first big service to be hacked in recent months, with Evernote getting hit hard by hackers.
Hacked accounts
When big news agencies start tweeting about bombing attempts against the President of the United States and attacks on Ground Zero, some may find it a little off, others may go berserk.
The problem is when agencies build up a reputation for sound information, many will ignore the different language and believe the article entirely.
Burger King may not be the perfect example of how Twitter users are fooled and we suspect most everyone who viewed this tweet to have a little chuckle and move on.
Associated Press brought some problems when their account got hacked as did NBC News.
The threat is only just beginning though and many are bound to be hacked as accounts wait for two step verification. Social engineering, simple passwords and other basic moves by hackers allow them easy access to handles.
Currently, FBI teams and other officials are looking for the hackers in question, although it seems hard to pinpoint the locations and there has been more than one group on these various handle attacks.
Two-step verification
The username and password is not good enough for verification and Twitter knows this. The company is currently working on two-step verification for users. Apple’s already enabled two step verification for its services, now Twitter follows.
This will mean any user who is not auto signed in will be given two different verification methods. Normally this is a password and a text code.
The advantages of the code is only the phone owner can view it, unless the hackers gain access to the code through social engineering again.
In any case, it takes away the possibility of brute force entry or social engineering tactics against Twitter.
A safer Twitter
Twitter is pretty poor when it comes to security, users who have handles less than four letters normally get accounts hacked and sold, because they are unique.
Now it seems the focus is on big accounts – many companies employ social teams to work on their media, and there is a lot of problems with social teams, including their lacklustre experience with security.
Twitter seems to now be taking security seriously and has been employing security managers and developers to make sure their website is safer in the face of more advanced hackers.
Twitter has been implementing a few changes to what users can do, recently, they allowed the users to download the full achieve of tweets from an account.
We are unsure when the feature will be implemented, hopefully sooner rather than later after this last string of attacks.
