You’ve been Twitterhacked

PayPal UK's Twitter account was yesterday taken over by a disgruntled customer who fired off a series of angry tweets complaining about the service. The unidentified person railed against PayPal freezing their account and also linked to paypalsucks.com, the "anti paypal site exposing the nightmare of doing business 'the paypal way.'

Last night, the Ebay-owned outfit suspended the account and stressed that this incident only affected Twitter and none of its credit card or other sensitive data had been breached. The account was quickly back up and running and the company tweeted: 'This account was hacked earlier. We have it in our control now. Your personal data is still 100% safe, hack occurred on Twitter not PayPal' and 'We apologise for the bad language and childish nature of tweets that came from this account at the time.'

I’m a big fan of Twitter. It is proving to be a really useful way for FStech to communicate with readers, distribute news and catch stories that might otherwise have passed us by. However, the relative ease with which one can access someone else’s account is a concern. The simple password system needs to be looked at and perhaps replaced by a two-way authentication system, at least on certain accounts.