Wednesday, Twitter was the victim of a wave of piracy. The accounts of Alain Juppé, ministries of Bercy or Forbes magazine were attacked by activists in favor of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For political reasons or by simple maliciousness, the pirates on Twitter are frequent and can affect any type of users. Le Figaro gives you some tips to protect your account.
● Have a good password
This is an essential first step: everything counts on a social network must be protected by a solid password. One of the most common methods used to enter a Twitter account is "brute force", that is, testing a very large number of combinations of numbers or letters. To resist these brutal attacks, you must abandon some bad reflexes: do not use your surname, forenames, dates of birth or any other personal data. Your password must contain characters of different types, such as uppercase, lowercase, numeric, or special characters. The National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI) recommends two methods for the undecided . The first, called "phonetic" Consists in rewriting an easy-to-remember sentence. "I bought eight cd for a hundred euros this afternoon" then becomes ght8CD% E7am. Another method is to summarize a quote with his first letters. "Thine is better than two thou shalt have it" is transformed into 1tvmQ2tl'A.
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Your password must be unique to each online account. Do not use the same combination on Twitter, Facebook and your mailbox. Finally, you should never send your password to anyone, or store it on a computer file that could easily be hacked. A solid password is therefore a combination that is both complex but can be restrained easily.
● Enable double-authentication
Dual authentication is also referred to as two-step validation or two-factor authentication. This is a process that adds an extra level of security to an account on a social network or site, usually through your mobile phone number. Once activated, double authentication protects your data in two steps: by asking your password, as usual, and then asking you to fill in a unique code that you receive directly on your phone.
Even if you are hacked by people who have had access to your password, they will not be able to enter your account without entering this additional item. This also means that each time you connect to a new device, you will need to enter a code. In case of attempted intrusion from an unknown machine (by a person having your password but no code), the site informs you by email or by SMS and invites you to change your password.
Double authentication is not a completely foolproof method. Nevertheless, it effectively protects against piracy that is not very complex but very frequent on social networks. On Twitter, you can activate it in the settings in the "account" category. Then activate the "connection check". You have the option of giving your phone number or using an authentication application that will generate a temporary code for each new connection.
● Monitor other applications
Another known method of piracy is to tackle an application linked to a Twitter account. On Wednesday, many social network users were hacked by activists in favor of Recep Tayyip Erdogan , the Turkish president. To do this, the hackers attacked the Twitter Counter service, which is used to measure the audience on Twitter. The social network allows other sites or services to connect to the account of its users. This allows some practical features, such as publishing your tweets automatically on Facebook. But it also multiplies the gateways into your account, and therefore the risks of being hacked. You have to be aware of the applications that have access to your account. Also consider revoking the " Access to any service that is no longer useful to you. You can manage these permissions in your settings , application category.
