Twitter Hack Explained

By: Melissa | January 10th, 2009

It seems quite apparent WPS is full-on embracing new new media outlets while at the same time trying to carve out a much smaller niche on the old. And since, yet again, the upcoming WPS Draft will be “live” over at the WPS twitter blog, I thought maybe it would be a good time to review the recent problems over at Twitter H.Q. especially if you – average women’s soccer sports fan – may be kinda new to all of this technology crap.

Fish is delicious but what the hell is phishing? Phishing is the attempt to create an almost identical version of a website to trick you into typing in your username and password so someone else can get a copy of it. Twitter faced this problem because some nefarious person (or persons) sent users direct messages asking them to click a link that took them to a site that looked just like the Twitter login page EXCEPT the url was listed as twitter.access-logins.com. This nefarious person (or persons) was (were) banking on the user to not notice the slight difference. Lucky for said nefarious person(s), many users didn’t.

And brute force hacking? Sounds painful Only painful in the sense that it’s time consuming. Right after the phishing scandal broke, Twitter faced strike two where some 18 year old kid ran a little program he (or she – we just don’t know) wrote to attempt to login to Twitter over and over with a giant list of words from the dictionary until one worked. This hack is extremely common, extremely easy to do, and extremely effective. And it worked for 33 high profile twitter accounts including Barack Obama, Facebook, Britney Spears, and… uh…

Oh, and this hack is extremely easy to prevent too. All one really needs to do is put processes in place that space out the times when a user can login and/or lock their account after a certain number of unsuccessful attempts. So I fully expect the folks at H.Q. to have this little hole plugged up well before Friday’s draft. Although, secretly, I think it would be hilarious if some 18 year old kid targeted a fledgling professional women’s sports league and jammed its twitter page with silly and sarcastic micro-blogs. Think of the publicity!