Spammers Compromised Popular Twitter Accounts Including Viacom And Microsoft Xbox

"A number of popular Twitter accounts suddenly wanted to help you add more followers," joked Engadget. An anonymous reader writes: Early Saturday morning, due to a breach of the Twitter Counter analytics service, the compromised Twitter accounts started posting images touting services that sell Twitter followers. The affected accounts include @PlayStation, @Viacom, @XboxSupport, @TheNewYorker, @TheNextWeb, and @Money (Time's finance magazine) as well as @NTSB (the National Transportation Safety Board) and @ICRC (the Red Cross), and the Twitter accounts of famous individuals include astronaut Leland Melvin, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, and actor Charlie Sheen. "We can confirm that our service has been hacked; allowing posts on behalf of our user," Twitter Counter posted Saturday, announcing minutes later that "hackers CANNOT post on our users' behalf anymore."
"Apologies for the spam, everyone," tweeted the account for Xbox support, adding "We're cleaning things up now."

I don't get it.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's not exactly news that Twitter is in need of ways to wring more cash out of their operation; and it's not news that these sorts of compromises and temporarily having your precious brand mouthpiece go off the rails can make customers a bit jumpy, so why don't they offer some appropriately overpriced enhanced authentication setup for the relatively deep pocketed users?

You've got a variety of solid options(RSA fobs, FIDO tokens, PIVs, etc.) for authentication; and could also add some options for delegation/limited roles to suit accounts where multiple people are generating tweets; without just having everyone share credentials in an egregious breach of sensible practice.

It'd hardly be free to implement; but when dealing with customers who routinely buy things like TV advertising time, you could probably get away with charging a fairly decent price for it.

Re:

[quibbler]

You know things are bad when their stock price drops back to under $20, their COO quits, a whole new site — Gab [gab.ai] was created to fight their wildly biased censorship practice, and to solve the problem, they put the ban-hammer into overdrive.
Twitter's key shareholders include #3: Steve "Monkeyboy" Balmer, and #2: Saudi royal PrinceAlwaleed Bin Talal. Meanwhile buyout investors are not happy with what they see [fortune.com].

Re:

[Calydor]

Related article: https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]

Hope Twitters dies

[EEPROMS]

I stopped posting on twitter when they started deleting anyone who opposed the left wing political correctness, everyone is a victim, agenda

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

You poor victim, my sympathies!

not Leland!

[Gravis Zero]

Why would you go after a retired astronaut with the most "internet" astronaut picture ever?! [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[ArtemaOne]

I see your cute dog photo and counter with Star Trek uniform on the ISS http://www.space.com/29161-ast... [space.com]

Too late to close the barn door now?

[shanen]

Question mark in the Subject: because I want to cling to optimism, but I personally think it's too late now. Would it make you feel any better if I blamed Al Gore? You see, by just giving them the money to create the Internet, he helped them ignore the financial models. Now the resulting mess has become so huge that we're struggling to figure out the boundaries between abuse of our privacy by huge companies, abuse of our privacy by criminal hackers, and abuse of our privacy by criminal hackers in the names