A compromised Twitter account: regaining control!

Posted by Celia Walter | 23 Feb, 2010

What is a compromised account, and how would you know?

If you notice that you have apparently been sending out tweets that you were not aware of, or followers start to tell you that you've been sending them Direct Messages that you didn't send, your account has almost certainly been compromised.

A third party application will have got access to the account and is tweeting and sending out DMs on your behalf. Very often such messages are designed to entice someone to follow a link back to the malicious application so that their account becomes compromised as well, or it might link to a sex site or some other site that you'd really rather not be associated with!

How did my account become compromised?

Almost certainly because you followed a link from someone that you trusted yourself. That's why these things are so annoying, and why they can spread across Twitter so quickly - you trust the people you follow, and your followers trust you. In all probability therefore you clicked on a link that you'd been sent. This might have taken you to another page, that looked exactly like the Twitter login page, and you may have shrugged your shoulders and logged in again. However, this was NOT Twitter - it was a page set up by the creator of the malicious application, and it will now have captured your details.

You may then find that you get routed back to Twitter, leaving you wondering what the message was all about, or it might take you to a boring page which you will then leave. By then however, the damage is done.

Help! My account is compromised - what do I do?

The good news is that you can regain control over your account quickly. Make sure that you log into your account - I would go to the address bar in the browser and type it in by hand, (or follow this link to Twitter) and log yourself in. Then go to your Settings page (top right hand corner), and click on Password. Change your password, verify it, and confirm the change. Second, click on Connections. This will take you to a list of third party applications that you have allowed to access your Twitter account. Run your eye down the list, and make sure you recognise them all. If you don't, hold your mouse cursor over the title, and check the site that it will take you to. If you still don't recognise the application, click on 'Revoke Access'. This will tell Twitter to stop allowing the resource to use your information. Don't worry if you've made a mistake - you can always return to the application website in the future and allow access again.

Congratulations - you now control your Twitter account again. But remember - never trust anyone on Twitter, even close friends! If you've been sent a DM with a link in it that you weren't expecting, ask them what it is. If you see a link in a Tweet that you don't expect, or which is out of character, check before clicking on it.

There is also a two minute screen cast to help you.

 

From Phil Bradley's weblog

Post in Twitter | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

What sort of web animal are you?

Posted by Celia Walter | 23 Feb, 2010

The Web Behaviour Test aims to find out what sort of web animal you are by surveying your web habits, as well as, testing your Internet searching and multi-tasking skills.

It is split into three main parts:

  • A survey of your web habits – how long you spend on various types of Internet activity, such as email, social networks etc.
  • Web search tasks – that look at how you formulate a search query, how long you take looking at search results and the sort of sites that you trust.
  • Multi-tasking tests -  a series of Flash games that seem to test your short term memory and ability to do more than one thing at a time.

At the end of the test you are assigned a web animal based on your answers – are you slow or fast moving, solitary or sociable, adaptable or specialised – to see if you are a Fox, Hedgehog, Octopus etc.

The test is part of the Virtual Revolution TV series from the BBC that has been looking at how the Internet has shaped politics, economics, society and people – the final episode Homo Interneticus – featured academic contributions from the CIBER centre at UCL who produced the Google Generation report that was based in part, on a user evaluation of Intute.

Having done the test – there are a few questions still in my mind …

Self-selecting sample? The main way of finding out about the test was by watching the Virtual Revolution programme and as Phil Bradley pointed out, there was such a high demand following the broadcast that the server fell over, but isn’t this a sample of people pre-disposed to be interested users of the Internet?

The science bit Some of the categories of Internet activity seemed to overlap, meaning that the survey results could be skewed and the Flash games seemed to be just a very basic way of testing short term memory – the science behind the test isn’t very enlightening and I’d like to know more about their thinking.

Who do you think you are? The majority of the people I know who have taken the test wound up as Foxes – just like me – perhaps it would have been interesting to get people to assign themselves to one of the categories after taking the test, but before revealing their results to see how good they were at assessing their own Internet activity.

… but feel free to make up your own mind by taking the Web Behaviour Test and perhaps letting us know in the comments – what sort of web animal are Intute users?

Intute features more resources aimed at improving your Internet research skills, including the Virtual Training Suite and the Internet Detective.

From Intute.ac.uk

Post in World Wide Web, Students in tertiary education | comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)