Tips to secure your Twitter Account

Hacking is a serious issue these days. For example, take the case of recent hacking of NPR’s (National Public Radio) twitter account and erroneous tweets were being made through it.

Twitter reported, last Feb, that about 250,000 twitter accounts were compromised following the attack, which involved many high profile accounts.

This article is about how to safeguard / secure your twitter account.

Following are some tips which I feel, may secure your twitter account:

1.Think twice before clicking a link:

Phishing is a child’s play these days. People enjoy such stuff. Many a time, we see sort of weird tweets from our friends’ accounts which does not mean that they themselves have posted such stuff, it means they are the victim of phishing attacks. They must have clicked on some spam links or may have provided their account information on any scam website.

The question now arises how to know which link is spam and which is not and the solution is WOT (Web Of Trust).

2.Have a Strong Password:

Be it your banking accounts or your social network accounts or any kind of account, a strong password is must. Accounts are made more vulnerable by weak passwords. I suggest to use LastPass to keep your password safe. And most importantly, never keep your name, date of birth, hometowns etc as your passwords. Your password must be long enough and should be a combination of digits, character, case sensitive, symbols etc. must be taken care of.

3.Review Third Party Apps:

Twitter and other social networks allow a third party to access your account information if you allow them. So it is suggested to have a clear idea of what the app is about and about its reliability. Only allow reliable apps to access your private information.

4.Ensure Secure Browsing:

Ensure that the URL contains “HTTPS” and not “HTTP”, which means you are browsing in secure mode and the website is secure.

5.Avoid Sharing Your Location:

It's not a good idea to share your location when you tweet. As not everybody should know our location at all times. To avoid automatic sharing of your location, go to your Account settings, scroll to “Add location to my tweets” and uncheck the checkbox or delete all the location information.

6.Tweet Maturely and Responsibly:

Tweet wisely, for we all know, Words Once Spoken Can’t Be Taken Back. So tweet short and cool and choose your words wisely.

So these were some common tips to safeguard your Twitter account from being hacked. The slew of hacks has made it obvious that something needs to be done asap. The company suggested its users to keep a strong password following the cyber attack, which sound to me, an irresponsible Tweet, because keeping a strong password is not enough, the company must introduce two-step authentication. Techno giants like Microsoft is even thinking of implementing multi-factor authentication to ensure security of its users.

Hopefully twitter may soon implement the same or the other sooner or later.

I hope you enjoyed reading my article. I would be obliged to see your comments below.

Thank You!!!

KGTricks

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Tips to secure your Twitter Account