Over 2,500 Twitter accounts have been taken over by scammers and are tweeting links to adult dating and sex personals websites. Once the accounts were compromised, the attackers essentially “rebranded” the account by changing profile photos, biographies, and names of the accounts to match the websites they were promoting.
Norton.com/setup Symantec has been investigating this issue, and they have found that there were a few high profile accounts that had followers from 20,000 upwards to hundreds of thousands that had been compromised.
How to Secure Your Twitter Account
It seems that these attackers are going after a variety of accounts, no matter the number of followers. If you’re an active Twitter user, some steps you can take to secure your account:
1. Beef up your Password:
It’s a good chance that a sizable amount of the accounts that were compromised used weak passwords, or re-used passwords on other services. Always use complex, unique passwords for each website you visit. You can learn more about how to create strong passwords and how to manage them here.
2. Password managers make things easier:
Unique passwords are key. If one set of credentials is leaked in a data breach, chances are they will be tried on other popular websites as well, especially ones that are related to finance. Keeping track of multiple passwords doesn’t have to be difficult. We suggest using a password manager such as Norton.com/setup Identity Safe.
3. Double up on your security by considering enabling Twitter’s Login Verification
(link is external):
In addition to using your username and password to log into a website, Twitter’s Login Verification sends a code to your mobile phone that you will use as an additional login step.
For the in-depth report on this investigation, you can read the Norton.com/setup Symantec Security Response Connect blog post here.
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