Twitter password breach is tip of the iceberg

Twitter

Everyone should use the latest social media scare with Twitter as an opportunity to review their password management. This means across all social media, websites, PCs and any other devices they use. Passwords should be treated like toothbrushes - not shared, and changed reasonably often.

Twitter’s detected breach resulted in them suggesting 250,000 users should change their passwords. Yet users who heed that advice may still find that apps they’ve given permission to access their Twitter account using the Twitter API, including the company's own, allow the service to be used without asking users to enter the new password. This is an example of technology working to make things easier for us, whilst inadvertently leaving a back door open to hackers through other services.

Whilst 250,000 is a small proportion of Twitter’s users, and Twitter reacted swiftly as you would expect, it still highlights how careful we all need to be with our IT security. Complacency can indeed be a killer, especially where it comes to personal and financial data. Most of us concentrate on making sure our computer and IT equipment are working as we wish, and are oblivious to the fact that a small minority of people are hell-bent on getting our data. We must all be vigilant.