LONDON ― The hacking of public figures’ Twitter accounts does not mean the social media giant has major internal security problems, cyber security experts have said, but they have urged users to improve their account security.
The Twitter account of Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris has become the latest to be compromised as a string of offensive messages was posted before being deleted.
It comes only days after the Twitter profile of Education Secretary Gillian Keegan also fell victim to hackers.
In a string of high-profile hacking incidents, Piers Morgan’s account has also been compromised in recent weeks.
In the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform and the departure of around half the company’s staff amid a ‘chaotic’ staff restructuring, there have been concerns raised over the strength and responsiveness of Twitter’s security systems.
There have also been reports of millions of user email addresses being scraped from the platform as part of a data leak and offered to hackers on online forums.
But cybersecurity experts have suggested that the biggest direct security threat to users is not in fact any internal issues at the company, but not taking their own personal account security seriously.
Research has shown that many internet users reuse passwords or use simple and easy-to-guess phrases for their login details.
Javvad Malik, lead security awareness advocate at KnowBe4 acknowledged that former Twitter head of security-turned-whistleblower Peiter Zatko had painted a “very unflattering picture” of Twitter’s security controls in a disclosure last year – which had claimed the site had a number of vulnerabilities – but argued individual user security was the key issue.
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