Recently, the University of Wisconsin-Madison had its Twitter account hacked and a series of profane and unusual tweets were tweeted by the hackers to the account’s 160,000 followers. Reproduced below is the last of the tweets sent.
It took about three hours for the University to regain control of its account. The hacking seemed to be more mischievous than malicious. College and University Twitter accounts are frequently targeted by hackers and it is somewhat disheartening that educators are not doing more to protect the security of their accounts.
TIPS
The primary lesson to be learned from this hacking is the importance of using dual factor authentication whenever possible. With dual factor authentication even someone with your username and password would be unable to access your account without a special code that is sent by a text message to your cell phone which must be used to access the account. The dual factor authentication protocols used by many companies often permit you to avoid the use of the code if you are accessing your account from your usual device, but require the code if access to the account is being attempted from another device. Here is a link to instructions for using dual factor authentication with Twitter accounts. https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170388
