Twitter Hacked

The little blue bird was taken down by the mouse on Tuesday. Millions of Twitter users around the world were affected when the popular social networking website went down to a virus for a few hours.

What’s alarmng is the kind of security concerns the website has now raised.

Thousands of users scrolled over links on twitter.com only to find ugly content appeared without warning, in some cases re-tweeting the links to followers and spreading the bug around the globe.

Later on Tuesday, Twitter told users the glitch was fixed. Some experts said the virus could have been harmless, just a nuisance to those affected, including users like White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and the wife of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Her account sent visitors to a porn site in Japan.

Others worry it exposed a nasty security flaw, one that could be exploited by hackers in the future to install malicious software and steal personal information. With Twitter’s rapid expansion — now at 145 million-plus users — the hash tag for that could be “trouble”.

The platform just wasn’t built for this and these kinds of attacks are going to probably keep coming on Twitter particularly and on a number of other social media platforms while security and a bunch of other features are catching up to the user base.

To keep your tweets safe, always keep an eye on what’s going out under your name. Make sure that you’re verifying the content that’s out there, and make sure you’re monitoring your own platform. And use caution with any link, even if it appears to be sent from a trusted follower.

In a blog posting on Tuesday, Twitter said users may see some unusual tweets lingering in their timelines, but the company is unaware of any security issues related to the glitch, and users’ information was not compromised.