Hacking Attack on twitter yesterday politically motivated DNS attack, which obviously rose a big question – Is Twitter safe? The initial answers will be no. I don’t think anyone needs to be a rocket scientist to give the answer. In my short one year internet career I witnessed Twitter Downtime several times due to hacking or phishing attack. Before explaining why Twitter is not safe we have to understand the fact of yesterday attack.

Here what Twitter Team officially said about this attack, “Domain Name System or DNS is an Internet protocol used to translate IP addresses into domain names so instead of typing in a long string of numbers we can enter urls like www.twitter.com into a browser to visit our favorite web sites. Last night, DNS settings for the Twitter web site were hijacked. From 9:46pm to 11pm PST, approximately 80% of Traffic to Twitter.com was redirected to other web sites.”

Now think what if the attack was not politically motivated what if the attack is done by a Cyber Criminal. According to senior technology consultant at Sophos Mr. Graham Cluley, “Just imagine what could have occurred if they had pointed people to a phishing site posing as Twitter (designed to steal login names and passwords) rather than a political message.”

Most of the twitter users are not technically sound, they are never going to see the address bar after typing Twitter.Com so it’s easy for a cyber criminal to steal anyone’s details and use that for bad purpose.

And this is not the first time hacker tried their luck on Twitter. Back in January we saw how a 18 years old boy mess  with high-profile Twitter accounts or how phishing attack take Twitter down.

It’s hard to teach general people about cyber security; it’s hard to teach them how not to compromise their account details on Twitter because they don’t have time for it and they are never going to remember it. They don’t have that microsecond to check back browser’s address bar, though they have the time for useless chat. They come into Twitter for fun and that’s acceptable. Because of them Twitter is here now, and is able to deal with huge money. Because of them Google and Bing brought Twitter feed. So, they should take care of us. Otherwise there will be a next Twitter.

Proofread by provamsi@india365