Twitter has temporarily disabled a widget based on Adobe’s Flash Player after a security expert advised them that their site could be exposed to hackers who could access Twitter users account login details.
The security analyst showed Twitter how he managed to take control of dummy account by simply clicking a link whilst logged in.
As a result of this threat, Twitter have assured their users that no one appears to be affected by the security breach. Twitter said it has disabled the misconfigured Flash object “out of an abundance of caution” whilst the situation is assessed.
However, this doesn’t appear to be the first time Twitter are in the headlines for their security. A couple of weeks ago, in an effort to stop hackers from accessing their users accounts, Twitter banned 370 common passwords, which does suggest that security breaches are becoming a recurring problem amongst Twitter and other websites. So what would be the repercussions if an attacker did manage to gain access to your account? Apart from removing and adding followers to your account, imagine them gaining access to your direct messages which are known to be private, especially if they hold sensitive data which could harm your identity.
This is a common problem which occurs across the internet and it has been suggested by security experts that a security flaw like this could take hackers a matter of minutes to access, if not maybe an hour or two at the most, so although Twitter may have thought they acted as quickly as they could, it actually took them 24 hours to respond to threat after it was reported, which doesn’t fill us with a lot of confidence about the site’s security.
Have you been affected by a Twitter security breach? Do you think sites should be doing a lot more to stop these malicious security threats from occurring? Leave us a comment and let us know.
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Tags: micro blogging, secuity, social networking, Twitter
