Associated Press had its Twitter account hacked yesterday, and inaccurate tweets posted in its name caused panic and financial turmoil.

The tweets that came from the verified account declared that there had been two explosions in the White House, and that President Barack Obama had been injured.

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Burger King has returned to Twitter with almost 30,000 more followers after its account was hacked last night and rebranded as McDonald’s. The burger chain lost control of its account and began sending out a string of McDonald’s related tweets.

The @BurgerKing Twitter account had little more than 80,000 followers when it was hacked, however, in the wake of the account takeover this has leapt to 111,314 giving it a gain of 30,000 followers and a wave of free publicity. Read More »

It might not come as surprise to many considering the volume of tweets we have sen around this subject, but the Portland NewsTweet Index has today confirmed that the Leveson Inquiry dominated journalists conversations in the Twittersphere this year.

The Newstweet Index, which analyses the content, impact and quantity of tweets generated by UK journalists, shows that the phone hacking scandal was the subject of one in five of journalists’ tweets between in the past year between July 2011 and June 2012.

Topics including ‘Murdoch’, ‘Hacking’ and ‘NOTW’ shaped this year’s Twitter discussion as journalists and others became hooked on the televised hearings. Read More »

“ Password-based security mechanisms — which can be cracked, reset, and socially engineered — no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing.”

If you haven’t read Wired writer Mat Honan’s gut-wrenching play-by-play of how his entire digital life was evaporated in the matter of hours, as his Twitter, iPhone, Mac, Gmail and iCloud were all hit, do yourself a favour and Instapaper it.

Or, if you’re too busy to read the whole article, I’ve created a quick-and-dirty summary that retraces the hacker’s steps and highlights some steps we can take to protect ourselves from similar attacks. Read More »

The accounts of 55,000 Twitter users have been hacked and the usernames and passwords copied into Pastebin. The hack is the largest in the service’s history, and required five pages on Pastebin to leak all the data. Twitter have said only that they are looking actively at the situation.

The ease with which the service could be penetrated could make users, and potential users, more cautious of using it, although I believe the idea was to highlight security flaws as opposed to anything more malicious. As AirDemon point out, this could have easily been avoided, by guiding people to use more secure passwords when they signup as is common practice on many websites, and encouraging regularly password changing. Twitter has always emphasised how easy it is to sign up and start posting, but this has left its users’ data vulnerable.
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