How To Prevent Your Twitter Account from Being Hacked

By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News Network
Monday, January 5, 2009

Twitter, with its increased popularity have obviously been at the dark sight of crackers. They try phishing to manipulate your account and also hijack your twitter profile to irritate your followers too. That may seriously harm your reputation and credentials though you were never aware of such issues yourselves. The scammers put up websites that look exactly like Twitter. These websites prompt you to login with your Twitter username and password and then use your Twitter account to spam your followers. They send direct messages and @replies under your account with their phishing url. Your followers may then click on the link, give their credentials and have the exact same thing happen. And this cycle will grow bigger each day. So what can you do to prevent them?

1. Don’t Trust any other Domain but Twitter

Whoever gives you a link or from whatever sources, do not log in with your twitter account anywhere excepting https://twitter.com. Check your browsers address bar before logging in and make sure its correct. look at this site for a change which has been a culprit in the recent past. Here is a screen-shot of that site:

[Do not click on that link unless you are too curious]

2. Do not Share Your Account Information with Anybody

Be very careful what outside Twitter applications you give your password to.  If an outside application asks for your password, read their terms and do a little research on who is behind the application.  If wary at all don’t give your password. There may be twitter tools which can harm you that way. Any third party twitter tool should not be trusted.

3. Do not Trust any Mail that Claims to Have Come from Twitter

If you receive an email notice saying you’ve received a Direct Message with a link that redirects to what seems like Twitter.com, be careful about entering your Twitter credentials. Instead, look closely at the URL to see if it’s not really Twitter but a sketchy phishing site. If you are not sure, then don’t click on it.

These are the three main tips I have for now to share with you. If you have more suggestion, please write to us and we will publish it for the benefit of others (with your name as the contributor).

[source: twitbacks.com]

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