There have been reports of users receiving emails from Twitter telling them to change the password on their account. And, while you might rightly be suspicious of any email asking for your password, this time it’s the real deal.
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Yesterday, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra lost access to her Twitter account. A nefarious hacker had stolen her password and locked her out, tweeting critical statements towards her and her government.
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Now is as good a time as any to double check your Twitter security. The Twitter safety team is going around resetting the passwords of any account that has been affected by a phishing scam.
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UPDATE: This article was written prior to the return of the Mikeyy virus, but the advice remains relevant and is good practice.

Thus far, nobody really knows what happened yesterday on Twitter with the StalkDaily explot. There’s been some speculation and the good news was that Twitter moved quickly to eliminate the problem. A 17-year old by the name of Mikeyy Mooney has claimed credit for the script, and looks responsible for the latest one that is doing the rounds (or is being scapegoated/glorified).

Twitter claims that nothing was jeopardised and I’m inclined to believe them. Still, when I recommended folk reset their passwords yesterday I was quite surprised at how many responses I got claiming that this course of action was either unnecessary or mad.

Here’s what I think: even if there was no risk to your password, why take the risk? If StalkDaily or whoever was responsible managed to find a way to add a script to my profile through a loophole on Twitter, what’s to stop them, or that script, doing something else?

Surely a policy of ‘better safe than sorry’ applies in all cases like this? You can always change your password back if you later discover there was no threat to your security. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.

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UPDATE: The solution is to send go to Twitter.com and request a password change. I was back in immediately after doing this. It can take a while to filter through to external clients (like TweetDeck). Thanks for everybody’s help!

Earlier today Twitter was hit by StalkDaily, a website that infected any Twitter visitor with a hack that made your account auto-tweet recommendations. Click here to read more, and to find out if you were infected.

I posted my suggested cure, which involved changing your password, which I did, to this website at 1.28pm GMT. It got re-tweeted well and generated a bit of interest.

I went to the cinema at 3pm, and when I came out, I could no longer login to my Twitter account.

My profile is still there, so I’ve not been suspended by mistake or anything else, so it’s not that. But when I got home and tried to login again, I finally got to see the problem: I’ve been locked out.

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