Twitter Cracks Down on Security for Political Accounts
After a targeted hacking campaign that compromised several political accounts, Twitter decided to tighten security. In a blog post, Twitter announced their preventative measures going forward.
“We’re taking the additional step of proactively implementing account security measures for a designated group of high-profile, election-related Twitter accounts in the US. Starting today, these accounts will be informed via an in-app notification from Twitter of some of the initial account security measures we will be requiring or strongly recommending going forward.
While we’re requiring some accounts do this given the unique sensitivities of the election period, everyone on Twitter can take advantage of these security measures, (and we encourage them to do so!)” — Twitter Safety
What Types of Political Accounts Fall in this Category?
- US Executive Branch and Congress
- US Governors and Secretaries of State
- Presidential campaigns, political parties and candidates with Twitter Election Labels running for US House, US Senate, or Governor
- Major US news outlets and political journalists
These users will be required to have a strong password which will be prompted the next time they log in and Twitter will also enable password reset protection for these accounts by default.
In July, Twitter’s internal systems were hacked and the accounts of dozens of high profile accounts including Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama were used to tweet a cryptocurrency scam. This created cause for concern from lawmakers over what could possibly happen if a breach of a similar nature occurred the day before the presidential election on November 3rd. In order to keep some of these concerns at bay, Twitter also encourages the targeted political users to enable a Two-factor authentication (2FA) as a further measure against unauthorized logins.
Twitter has released more information on how its platform manipulation and spam policies apply to groups coordinating to cause harm. They define coordination as technical and social.
“Technical coordination refers to the use of specific, detectable techniques of platform manipulation to engage in the artificial inflation or propagation of a message or narrative on Twitter. Social coordination refers to on- or off-Twitter coordination among a group of people to amplify or propagate a specific message.” — Twitter
These preemptive security measures are a crucial step forward for the social media platform. In the coming weeks it is expected that the company will have better detection to respond quickly and efficiently to any further suspicious activity to decrease and prevent future hacks.
