Because of the misfortune of one of my Twitter friends today, I have learnt a very hard password lesson which I thought I should share. In actual fact, I don’t think the problem necessarily occurred because of passwords, but it is still enough to make me think and do something about it.
Soon after I opened Tweetdeck this morning, I started seeing some pretty offensive tweets written in uppercase letters from one of the people I only recently started following. I have had the situation before where I started following someone and soon realised I wasn’t comfortable with what they were tweeting, so I unfollowed them pretty quickly. I assumed that this was just one of those situations, so I went to their profile to unfollow them, and spotted a tweet in amongst the offensive, shouty tweets saying
“I am so sorry. It isn’t me. My Friendfeed has been hacked…”
I realised at that point that the barrage of tweets was the result of a malicious attack on this user and they were powerless to do anything about it. It seemed that the attacker had hacked into the Friendfeed account, changed the email address and password so that the legitimate user could no longer access the account and make any changes to it or shut it down, and proceeded to send hate-filled, abusive and offensive tweets out as fast as they were able, all containing links (which the poor victim, when they could get a tweet in edgewise, begged their followers not to click on).
This went on for nearly half an hour. The victim contacted Friendfeed support, but could do little more than that except sit and wait. When he finally stopped it, the poor guy could only start picking up the pieces, apologising and, I suspect, looking at his reduced follower numbers and contemplating what that criminal had done to his reputation.
I am not going to go into a tirade about spammers or hackers and what worthless pieces of pond-scum they can be. Nor am I going to go into how pathetic this malicious hate attack was (unfortunately I suspect there was a religious agenda behind it as the victim was a stated atheist and the hacker took great pains to point it out, amongst the rest of his highly offensive and not particularly coherent tirades). Sadly, as much as we want social media to herald a new era of understanding and collaboration and cooperation, we can’t forget that behind it all is the human race and that means the nasty side as well as the good.
What I would like to point out though, which is more relevant to the subject of this blog, is that it is incredibly easy for your reputation to be damaged by someone else, and it is far, far too easy for us to get blase about our passwords. If the victim had used the same password for multiple accounts (and come on, who hasn’t done that at some point in time?) and the hacker had got hold of it, then it wouldn’t have just been Friendfeed and Twitter that had been hit.
The result of this incident is that I have downloaded a password protection program, and changed every single password on my social media and other accounts, just to be sure. I, like many, haven’t been careful enough until now. This kind of horrible event should be a wake up call for all of us.
Thanks to Bill Strong for the image
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Tags: Friendfeed, hackers, passwords
