Cheltenham councillor victim of Twitter hacking
A COUNCILLOR from Cheltenham is among the 250,000 people worldwide who have recently had their Twitter account hacked.
Cyber criminals took over the account of borough councillor Andrew Chard last night and sent out a number of tweets and direct messages.
Some of the Leckhampton councillor's followers received a message from his account saying 'Did you see this pic of you? lol' followed by a link to a dead page.
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Mr Chard, who currently has 292 followers and is following 629 others on the social media site, was alerted to the cyber-attack when he received messages from contacts who had spotted the strange tweets.
He has since changed his Twitter password and sent out a tweet advising people that his account had been hacked.
Mr Chard, who owns the Montpellier House hotel, said: "It's a lesson for us all to change our password regularly.
"I'm not too worried about being hacked because there is no sensitive information on my account.
He added: "I'm not sure why the hackers have targeted me, but it might be because I tweet a lot. I have recently started using TweetDeck and Buffer – that's the only new thing I have been doing on Twitter recently. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with that."
Twitter recently announced that the accounts of 250,000 users worldwide had been hacked into by cyber criminals, who may have seen email addresses and encrypted passwords.
4 Comments
by Jewbacca
Friday, February 08 2013, 8:46AM
“Quite right. If they're doing any targetting it's towards stupid people with rubbish passwords that never change and are used for every web site.”
by tishwash
Thursday, February 07 2013, 6:59PM
“they aren't targetting you ! they would of just gone for as much as they could and spammed out using the account details, again you're not important and they didn't target you specifically.”
by AndyPrestbury
Thursday, February 07 2013, 11:17AM
“Dangers of using the internet and it will get worse. The convinience of being able to connect with anyone anywhere also means your information can be attacked by anyone anywhere. Then again you also get call-calling by phoen by scammers, and junk letters promising you have won a fortune as well.”
by Bonkim2003
Thursday, February 07 2013, 10:48AM
“Dangers of social networking. It could get worse. Best to avoid publicising your details to all and sundry.”