Twitter could arguably be the facebookâesk Internet phenomenon of 2008 with millions of information hungry users tracking their favourite friends and organisations through a series of status updates.
As with many new fads the early technology rarely accounts for security until they get hacked. Twitter is no exception, some notable names including Britney spears had their accounts hijacked this week in what appears to be simple password guessing attack on an Twitter admins account.
This old school hack uses a principle of trying many password combinations until the right one is found, usually with the use of a simple script or tool. Twitter accounts do not enforce any password lockouts, policies or the use of CAPTCHA (those annoying wiggly letters you have to type in) making them prone to this kind of attack. The use of a decent password however would have stopped this attack in its tracks. Passwords should be of 8 or more characters, uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special characters.
Base them around a saying to make them more memorable for example $RobRul3s007$ which is my twitter password (joking) which is very unlikely to ever be found in this kind of attack.
