Twitter

[Fotia]

My Twitter account got hacked or phished big time. There were people showing tweets that I never followed, and I'm talking some hot and heavy porn stuff as well as celebrities like Paris Hilton, Carrie Fisher, etc. When I checked my own list of people I follow, none of these tweeters were on my list yet their tweets kept showing up. And try getting hold of these Twitter people! It's worse than trying to change the wind!

My computer scans frequently for bugs and other malware yet somehow Twitter was implying that my computer got a bug. I have rather heavy security on my computer too, and I've had a history of big time spammers trying to invade my Twitter account. So now I have just cancelled it.

Anybody else with this problem?

[Mayliz]

Not with Twitter but I recently had someone create a FB account with one of my novel character's name, it was a bit freakish. I had an acct set up with her name - I wrote about it some time ago. It seems like there's a rise in these cases probably due to more bitter IT people losing their jobs. That's my husband's theory, anyway. With so much time on their hands, they are well known for wanting destruction, one way or another.

[GenevieveOfAtlanta]

My FB was hacked a few weeks ago, and my status updates kept advertising for some ridiculous colon cleanse product! I had to change my password twice to get rid of the spammers. During the second round, it was actually Facebook themselves that alerted me to the problem. Sigh. It seems to come with the territory these days.

[Asim]

Getting someone's password is pretty easy, actually. On a un-or-weakly-secured WiFi? Someone can connect to it, and see most passwords coming through. Logged in on someone else's WiFi? Same thing. Logged in on a public PC? You have no idea who's using that machine, if a keylogger's been installed, etc. etc. And, of course, there's the usual fake login screens (the reason you never login to a service from an email link), and so on.
This is not a case of "don't use them." I do, but I do try to be careful. For this, I'd recommend you only login via https://twitter.com -- the "https" part triggers Twitter's SSL encryption of your login, helping to protect passwords sent to it. (They don't use 'em by default because it eats up a ton of CPU time, compared to regular logins). That should protect well against anything save the keyloggers and "bad links"; for that, just avoid logging into any service on a machine you don't own and trust, and depend on your bookmarks over emails, even legit-looking ones.
And change your passwords often. At least every 6 months, and anytime you have to login on a system you don't know. If you have issues remembering all this, I recommend software like KeePass, which'll not only store passwords, but remind you when they expire based on dates you set.

All this just helps more; it's not perfect. But yes, even with a system with a firewall, and all the software protection you can install, there are still ways people can get access, and reasons to be careful and cautious.

[*Shira*]

There are now some porno-spammers who set up twitter accounts and use the twitter "@" feature (ie, the reply thing) to spam you. I've had a few run-ins with these lately, and they're gross. Every time one uses that @shiradotnet feature to post a porn thing to me, I report it to twitter as spam and hide my user name from that address. But they just keep setting up new accounts. If twitter doesn't get a handle on this soon, they'll go the route of usenet. (Ie, it'll become clogged with spam, people will quit using it, and it'll die.)

[Fotia]

Asim, I'm going to do this when I set up a new account. And yes, to all of you, it seems these incidents are on the rise. MySpace is starting to show up with spammers again and for me, it was relatively quiet for awhile, same with Facebook. But Twitter just exploded on me so I will definitely go the "long route" again when I do re-sign with them.