After noticing "unusual activity," Twitter sysops did "some digging" and discovered a network of "compromised torrent sites," designed to record and transmit users' e-mails, passwords, and personal information. As studies have shown that nearly 75% of people use the same password on their banking site(s) as they do on others, this could be very bad for some Tweeters!
Twitter said it hasn't identified all the Torrent sites affected, but it reset the passwords on the compromised accounts. Of course, this doesn't help those users secure their accounts on the other sites where they used the same password. You are encouraged to use a different password for every site and keep a written record of this information instead of storing it in a file on your computer.
Sophos' annual report suggests such attacks are up 70% on social networks, and so is spam. Facebook is considered the "riskiest," though the security firm notes that, because it is the largest, it obviously attracts more attention.
© C Harris Lynn, 2010
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