Twitter calls for smarter password habits following Jeep, Burger King hacks
Twitter is urging its account holders to be smarter with
their passwords following two recent attacks by hackers directed at Burger King
and Jeep that took control of those accounts.
The accounts for Burger King and the Chrysler-owned car
company were broken into on Monday and Tuesday, respectively. Both accounts
have since been restored, but not before the hackers posted tweets about
fictitious acquisitions and embarrassing photos to the companies' respective
feeds. In Burger King's case, for example, one message read that the company
had been sold to McDonald's because the Whopper, the chain's flagship sandwich,
flopped.
Twitter responded late Tuesday afternoon with a blog post
that did not specifically mention the Burger King or Jeep hacks but did suggest
that poor password practices may have been to blame for the account breaches.
"Over the past couple of days, there's been a fair
amount of conversation about account security on Twitter," Bob Lord, the
site's director of information security, said in the post. "We thought
we'd take advantage of this moment to remind you of best practices around
passwords -- both on Twitter and on the Internet generally," Lord said.
Chief among the site's recommendations is that account
holders should use a strong password of at least 10 characters that include
upper- and lowercase characters, numbers and symbols. A unique password should
be used for each website people use, and user names and passwords should never
be given to unknown third parties, "especially those promising to get you
followers or make you money," the blog post said.
People should also be wary when clicking on links in
direct messages on Twitter, and should only enter their passwords when they are
sure they are actually on Twitter.com and not a phishing website merely
purporting to be the site, the company said.
Finally, having the most recent patches, upgrades and
antivirus software installed is also a good habit to adopt, according to the
blog post.
The Burger King and Jeep hacks followed a previous attack
directed at Twitter itself earlier in the month, when the company's servers
were breached by hackers who may have made off with user names and passwords
for about 250,000 users, Twitter announced Feb. 1.
There is no relationship, however, between that incident
and this week's Burger King and Jeep hacks, a Twitter spokesman said. Neither
Burger King nor Jeep could provide any information about whether this week's
hacks were related to Twitter's earlier data breach.
Facebook, meanwhile, was subject to a hacking attack last
week.
But while attacks against social media accounts are
increasing in frequency, "most threats come from the inside -- not
external forces," said analysts Alan Webber and Jeremiah Owyang at
Altimeter, a business research and consulting firm.
For example, a lack of password control within an
organization, or rogue employees, could give rise to potential data breaches,
they wrote Tuesday in a blog post.
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