In this age of social media usage, it has given the masses a voice to air out their opinions and some of these opinions especially targeted towards the government might lead to the people airing it being investigated. This has led to some social networks warning their users of their accounts being targeted for information and it seems Twitter is the latest platform to do so.
We received a warning from @twitter today stating we may be "targeted by state-sponsored actors" pic.twitter.com/oZm83eVFC5
— coldhak (@coldhakca) December 11, 2015
Just received this email from Twitter suggesting my account may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors. pic.twitter.com/QLcCzsHphw
— Runa Sandvik (@runasand) December 11, 2015
Twitter just emailed me . "..your Twitter account .. may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors" pic.twitter.com/0t6V8lRHgG
— Anne Roth (@Anne_Roth) December 12, 2015
These messages from Twitter have a central message:
…your Twitter account is one of a small group of accounts that may have been targeted by state sponsored actors. We believe that these actors (possibly associated with a government) may have been trying to obtain information such as email addresses, IP addresses, and/or phone numbers.
This might be a cause for concern as privacy online is surely blurring and Twitter even went ahead to advise the said users to use Tor, which makes your connection anonymous. Fortunately, Twitter informed the people that there was “no evidence” of their account information being obtained.
This situation is akin to what Facebook did to alert its users of alleged government sponsored hacking of user accounts. In Facebook’s case however, they will display a pop-up that will allow you to secure your account quickly where they send a security code to your phone number so as to log in.
How do you secure your Twitter account? Well you can enable 2 factor authentication by going to settings on twitter.com > Security and privacy > enable verify login requests. You can go ahead and enable “require personal information to reset my password” to further secure your account.
