Secure Your Accounts Today
No better example of simple security preventing what would have been at best a major disruption of my account or at worse a loss of control and embarrassment than last night
I was joining the #HCLDR tweetup when I received notification on my phone
Someone was trying to login to my account from a new and unrecognized device. I joined the chat and made the comment
Original tweet from #HCLDR chat
But secure in the knowledge whoever was trying to get in was unable to because they did not have the code that twitter was asking for that had just been sent to my phone
Fast forward to this morning and a widespread hack is revealed
In a large-scale Twitter hack, thousands of Twitter accounts from media outlets to celebrities, including the European Parliament, Forbes, BlockChain, Amnesty International, UNICEF, Nike Spain and numerous other individuals and organizations, were compromised early Wednesday.
http://thehackernews.com/2017/03/twitter-account-hack.html
(I am wondering what the criteria was by the hackers for selecting accounts given my account targeted but no one else on the chat noted any irregularities)
Enable Two Factor Authentication
A simple change in your account settings can have prevented this — at a minimum making it much harder to steal your account and credentials.
There are many choices but 2 simple options — Use Your Mobile phone and Text Messaging — or use Google Authenticator
For Twitter
Link a mobile phone to your Twitter Account and then:
Settings/Privacy — Enable Login Verification
and while you are there — Enable requirements for personal information to reset your password
For Google Accounts
Enable Two Factor Authentication using your mobile phone and text messaging — this is available for you google accounts including GMail
You can find the details for this here
Google Authenticator
Google Authenticator for Android and for Apple iOS
The impact is minimal and there will be occasions when you might be logged out and have to re-log back in but these are minor challenges compared regaining access to your accounts and the potential embarrassment of content posted under your name that is offensive
Your Digital World is being Watched and Needs Securing
Which Accounts
All of them! But if you can’t or don’t want to do that the obvious ones are anything dealing with your financials and then important to add your email accounts — if these are left unsecured then it can be trivial to reset your passwords and gain access to all the other accounts linked to your email address
This post originally appeared on Medium and LinkedIn
