Friday, May 31, 2024

My (not) Twitter Account Got Hacked

My (not) Twitter (I refuse to refer to it by a single letter) account got hacked and so I got to see first-hand how utterly inadequate (not) Twitter's security measures are.  The hacker immediately changed both my password and email address so I can no longer access the account and I can't do a password reset.  Which is such an incredibly stupid design because of course anyone who breaks into an account is going to do those two things.  It's all the more infuriating because all they would need to do to fix this is, whenever someone changes their email account, to send a message to the old account saying, "Please confirm that you want to change your email account."  Or maybe just put a time delay on the change becoming effective so that when the actual owner of the account gets the notification that they have been hacked there is actually a chance that they could, you know, do something about it rather than just getting locked out immediately.

Not only am I locked out of my account, but I can't even look at my own feed to see what the hacker is posting on my behalf because (not) Twitter requires you to log in to see any of its content.  So to see what the hacker is doing, I would need to create a new account.

Not that any of this matters much.  I hardly ever used my account.  I can't remember the last time I logged in.  I think I had seven followers.  But the utter stupidity of their design still steams my clams.

[UPDATE] I reported the problem to (not) Twitter tech support and it took less than five minutes to receive this reply:

We’re writing to let you know that we’re unable to verify you as the account owner. We know this is disappointing to hear, but we can’t assist you further with accessing your account.

 In other words, if someone hacks your (not) Twitter account, you are just shit out of luck.

2 comments:

  1. I find it so hard to believe that Xitter (think Chinese President pronouciation) lets someone update the email address without an email verification or any other second verification method that I prefer to believe this is AI generated fake news. /s

    I also hope that this was the result of some personal direction of Elon's sent out at 4:20 in the afternoon and old Twitter was not so foolish.

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  2. > Xitter (think Chinese President pronouciation)

    I love it!

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