Triona's Tech Tips

I am seeing a rash of people whose Twitter accounts have been hacked. If you receive a DM (direct message) to your Twitter account saying “is this you???” with a shortened URL, DO NOT CLICK on the URL. Notify your friend via another means and encourage him or her to change Twitter passwords.

Note that it’s the person sending the DM who is the one hacked. But if you receive a message like this, it doesn’t hurt to visit twitter.com directly (DON’T click the DM link!) and change your password anyway.

It is vital to use strong passwords (mix of letters, numbers, upper and lower case, symbols where permitted; no plain dictionary words or easily identifiable names like your spouse, your kids, or your dog). You also need to use a different password on every system, even if you think it’s a pain to do so. If you use the same password in more than one place, the hacker then has entry into the rest of your accounts, like email, web sites and–heaven forbid–bank accounts. In fact, you might want to make an afternoon of it and change all of your passwords everywhere, which is a good thing to do on a regular basis. And don’t cycle passwords between accounts, you never know if one might be compromised. New passwords, strong passwords, different passwords for every system.

This particular worm has been around for a while but like all viruses tends to keep propagating. Be wary of suspicious links and use a site like ExpandURL to investigate shortened links before you click on them. When in doubt you are always better off manually typing in a Web address instead of clicking on a link. These scams are not limited to Twitter but can encompass any type of computer login.