There are two major precautions to protect twitter account.Password protection and new application.
With Twitter Scams, account hacks and spam attacks happening more often than not, it seems most of us have got used to it (is there any other option for the end users ?). The big question that’s knocking Twitter’s head right now might be “Is there some steady solution to the whole bunch of troubles bugging Twitter every now and then?”.
We just hope Twitter is already working hard to get some ‘Prevention measures’ rather than just ‘Curing’ after the beans are spilled out in the middle.
To remind you all , below are those famed Scams, hacks and spams that made the news and kept our lives at twitter more vulnerable than usual.
- Date : May 26, 2009
- Trouble: Twittercut Scam
- Disguising Tweet: “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from Twittercut [site link]”
- Date: May 12, 2009
- Trouble: Manipulating ‘Twitter Trending Topic‘ to extract other credentials
- Disguising Trending Topic: #TwitterPornNames
- Date: March 06,2009
- Trouble: Chatwebcamfree(dot)com Scam
- Disguising Tweet: “hey! 23/Female. Come chat with me on my webcam thingy here www(dot)chatwebcamfree(dot)com.”
- Date: Jan 5, 2009
- Trouble: High Profile Accounts Hacked
- Compromised Accounts: Barack Obama, Britney Spears, CNN’s Rick Sanchez, Fox News and Facebook
After all the scams and hacks that have happened with Twitter so far, there are two major learnings/precautions one must take away..
1. Try keeping your password too tough to remember
My previous password at Twitter was 25 characters long (latest one is even longer & complex) and was full of Upper case alphabets, lower case alphabets, special characters, numerics etc(thoroughly jumbled as well). My password was nowhere related to my personal information.(Imp: Your profile information is hacker’s key to your account password, in case you set your password associated with your personal info).
Try to set your password too tough to remember, even by your own self. In daily usage, your password will be saved within your browser so lesser hassles for you to remember it. You can write down your password details in some document on your harddisk, in case you forget your tough to remember password. In worst possible case, you can reset your Twitter password using your mail-id. All these precautions are much better than having your Twitter account compromised by some hacker.
Although folks try to refrain themselves from setting a Non-associated password(more tendency to forget it) but from my personal experience, i can assert that even Toughest and completely Non-associated passwords will be soon hard- printed in your memories, if you keep using them on a daily basis.
2. Look into ‘Twitter Search’ about any new Third party application that urges you to submit your Twitter Credentials
Although when the stage of scam is too raw(have just started to begin), you might not find many tweets about any possible scam but its always advisable to search on Twitter about that new ‘third party app’ you’ve come across before putting your Twitter credentials. There are chances that tweeples who got duped at early stages might be spreading some precautionary tweets to their followers.