This morning, dozens of official Twitter accounts were hit by a hack. Among the victims, also giants of international information such as BBC North America, Reuters Japan, Forbes and Die Welt, but also of organizations such as Amnesty International and Unicef USA.
Hi everyone – we temporarily lost control of this account, but normal service has resumed. Thanks.
— BBC North America (@BBCNorthAmerica) 15 March 2017
Tweets with Turkish writing, Nazi symbols and hashtags against Germany and the Netherlands (“#nazialmanya” or “#nazihollanda”) appeared on the pages of the hacked accounts, countries that entered into conflict with Ankara for preventing Turkish ministers from campaigning on the their territory in view of the referendum with which Erdogan aims to establish an authoritarian presidential system.
The Le Figaro website reports that many French institutional accounts have also been targeted, including those of the Ministry of Economy and Finance. In these cases, the Turkish flag, a video and a message in Turkish appeared on the accounts.
The situation returned to normal on the Ministry and Finance and Forbes websites within about twenty minutes, writes Le Figaro again, which publishes an image of what the hacked Twitter accounts looked like.
The Financial Times has proposed some advice to protect yourself from hacker intrusions on the social network. First: change your Twitter login password immediately. Second: revoke the authorizations to all the apps that connect to your profile by going to the settings and clicking on the "applications" panel, from where you can access the list of connected applications.
Each of these apps, explains the FT, such as Tweetdeck, Twitter Counter or Periscope has its own specific access permissions, which can be simply read the tweets, or send them from your profile automatically or even access the linked email account. At this point, click on the button to revoke the relative authorizations and you are more secure.
