Twitter entreats users to use better passwords

Twitter is urging users once again to improve their passwords – both on Twitter and on other online services.

Apart from the usual advice on using longer, more complex, and unique passwords for all websites they use, Twitter Director of Information Security Bob Lord entreats users not to click on suspicious links in Direct Messages, as they often lead to phishing sites that often look like Twitter’s login page.

“Whenever you are prompted to enter your Twitter password, just take a quick look at the URL and make sure you’re actually on Twitter.com,” he counsels, adding that giving out their username and password out to unknown third parties is generally a bad idea, as their accounts can then get easily hijacked.

Finally, he adds that keeping their operating systems, AV software, and browsers updated and patched is essential for keeping safe online.

Twitter has recently experienced a breach that ended in some 250,000 users having their passwords reset and session tokens revoked.

As it turned out, Twitter and other companies such as Facebook and Apple have had their internal systems compromised following a watering hole attack that misused a previously unknown Java vulnerability.

His last advice would not help those who visited the site, but the fact is that the great majority of attacks aimed at home users take advantage of flaws that have been documented and patched for quite some time. Unfortunately, the victims are bad at keeping up with the updates.

It is unknown if this blog post was prompted by the recent hijacking of the Burger King and Jeep Twitter accounts.