Twitter Resetting User Passwords After possible Hijack Attack But: ‘unintentionally’ Reset Too Many Passwords

Have you tried to log into your Twitter account today, only to find out you are unable to access it with your password, you are not the only one. A possible hack of thousands of Twitter accounts worldwide has

prompted the company to mass email Twitter users to reset their passwords.

Twittersphere was abuzz Thursday morning, a technical problem at Twitter caused a number of users receiving an email from Twitter informing them that their account had been hacked. and asked them to enter a new password because it had reset it already.

Tweeters who received the email from Twitter informing them that “Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter,” read the email. “We’ve reset your password to prevent others from accessing your account.” were concerned that the email was a phishing scam and ignored to change their passwords.

As the Twitter team become aware of the problem, they were indeed quick to respond and post a statement on Twitter, Here is their statement in full:

“We’re committed to keeping Twitter a safe and open community. As part of that commitment, in instances when we believe an account may have been compromised, we reset the password and send an email letting the account owner know this has happened along with information about creating a new password. This is a routine part of our processes to protect our users. In this case, we unintentionally reset passwords of a larger number of accounts, beyond those that we believed to have been compromised. We apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused. As always, we recommend that people review these tips on how to keep their Twitter accounts secure:”
https://support.twitter.com/articles/76036-keeping-your-account-secure#

The mass email comes after some Twitter users reporting they received same email on a number of occasions earlier this week, some received them as far back as a week to two weeks ago.

Sometimes hakers will send out a large wave of scam email from all the Twitter accounts they have compromised. When this happens, Twitter take notice, and may send out a large number of password reset emails, trying to catch everyone who may have been compromised. This can happen several times a year.

This not the first time Twitter sent out email en masse to users, as a precaution when a large number of accounts have been hacked. Twitter will cast wider net than might be necessary and have asked other users to reset their password despite no indication of thier account being breached.

Twitter usually try to move fast and blocks the links from working, but they do work for short time beforeTwitter figure out they should be blocked, hijackers will try to be ahead of the game and change the URLs after they are blocked to try to keep fishing new user.

How Could Your Accounts Get Hijacked?

The most common reason you accidentally or not knowing logged into a fake Twitter page that look exactly like Twitter. or you may have recieved an email that look like an alert from your Twitter accounts that say things like “was this you in this pic?” or “people are saying bad things about you here:” with a link to click on it, if you do it will take you to the fake page that look exaclty like Twitter.

When you type your username and password into that page, it gets stolen. Of course, how would you have known that? So to avoid being directed to the fake page, don't click on any link unless you could read the URL address.

How to Protect Your Accounts from Getting Hijacked?

On most Internet Browser (Microssft Explorer, FireFox, Safari..) you can highlight the link and right click on your mouse, find properties and click it to read the URL address it should always have your usermane at the end of the URL address, if you see a long funny name, then it is a fake address don't click on it. Just login direclty to your account by typing the URL in your browser

The trick is that the hijackers make the page look identical to Twitter, except for the address (URL) of the webpage.

So the trick for hijackers is to make you excited and:

1) Getting you to click a link
2) Getting you to enter your password.

As long as you don’t fall for step (1) you’re not going to land on the fake page, and if you don't get to step (2) then you maybe safe!

So always remember: Just because it looks like Twitter doesn’t mean it is!

Always check the URL of the page, or, better yet, make it a habit to always type “twitter.com” into the URL address bar of your browser and press enter to make sure you’re actually at Twitter.com. or if you have the URL address bookmarked or in your Favorites always access it from there.

Keep in mind that hakers new favorite site to mass hijack are the popular Social Media Site from Twitter, Facebook, stumbler, instagram, linkdin and many others and they use same fishing technique but with subject relevent to the site. if you are a user of any of these Social Media Sites don’t fall for step (1) or step (2) then you maybe safe!