Keeping your profile safe in on any Social Network is very important.
There is a Twitter hacker working his way through Twitter right now that you need to watch out for. Look out for a message that reads like "Did you see this pic of you? Lol". When you click on the link it directs you to a website that really looks like a Twitter login page. The page asks you to ReEnter your login information. Don’t Do It!
This is one of the two ways that hackers now days are able to get your password easily. The first way they do it is to reset your password. If you think about it, all they have to do is get ahold of your email account and they will have the ability to reset any password you have.
The second popular way to gain access to your personal profile info is to redirect you to a login form that looks legit. When you enter your username and password or email and password, the information is sent to them, in plain text. They can then login to your account with your information.
In the case of this current Twitter scam, the hacker then sends a direct message to all of your followers with the same link to the fake login form that they sent you. At that point it looks like YOU sent the message to your followers. Not a good situation.
Precautions to Take
If you have clicked on the Twitter message mentioned above and entered your login information in the form, all you need to do is change your password and the hacker can no longer access your account,
but you need to also send an urgent message to all of your followers telling them not to click on the link. You can also direct them to this post by copying this link, http://goo.gl/BMbDA , and pasting it in your tweet.
One more thing that you need to keep in mind is that you may, and probably do, have other accounts elsewhere with that same password. Make sure to change all of them and fast! Any of accounts that you have that you use twitter as a login will be fine once you change your Twitter password, but any others that are connected to your name with the same password that you used on Twitter need to be changed immediately!
Monitor any accounts that you have changed the passwords on for suspicious activity.
General Safety practices
There are a couple of precautionary steps you can take to help this kind of thing not have too big of effect on your life, if and when it happens to you.
- Don’t use the same passwords on all your accounts! I know this creates an inconvenience but if all your accounts have the same password, all a hacker has to do is get ONE of them and they have ALL of your accounts!
- Choose a password that is at least moderately strong. Do not use "Password" or "12345" as your password. Keep in mind that this will not help with the above mentioned Twitter Hack.
- NEVER enter in your login information on a page that you got for a post or a tweet, no matter how legit it looks. One thing you can do to make sure you are at the right place is to open another tab in your browser and enter the direct address for your destination in the address bar. Then you will know you were not redirected to a false location. (This applies to links in posts and tweets.)
Hackers are always coming up with ways to make our lives more difficult and it can be a frustrating pain to deal with extra passwords and taking an extra step here and there, but when you are hacked in one account and it has a different password than your other accounts, they will be safe. That is worth a little extra work for that peace of mind.