Security Issues Plague Twitter

Posted on January 6, 2009

Twitter has been hit by a series of security issues lately. The latest was a hack of 33 Twitter accounts that saw fake message posted on the Twitter accounts of popular Twitter users including Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Rick Sanchez (pictured on the right) and Facebook. You can see some of the hacked account images here on Flickr.

In short Twitter style here are three of the security issues Twitter is facing.

People are giving out their passwords to use third-party tools.
Phising attacks are trying to get people to click on links that take them to websites that try and steal their Twitter passwords.
Twitter was hacked and 33 major Twitter accounts were made to post fake tweets.

Twitter recently addressed all three of these issues in two posts: one called Monday Morning Madness and one called Gone Phising.

Twitter says they do plan to add OAuth which will help with people that want to register for third-party Twitter apps and tools. This won't stop phising attempts and it wouldn't have stopped the hack.

They have discussed the ongoing Twitter phising attempts. Phising may be a real big problem for microblogging sites going forward as there is always a certain level of trust involved when people are sharing links.

The issue where Twitter itself was hacked and fake tweets were posted to Twitter accounts is a more serious issue and it involved a hack of the tools used by the Twitter support team. Since the hack included President-elect Barack Obamas Twitter (although his wasn't the sole account attacked) it does raise the possibility that Twitter could ask the FBI to help them pursue the hackers.