I don't think people would've given this tweet that much credibility if the situation in Boston hadn't just happened.

The best part was when all the naive people that took that news without any confirmation and started selling off stocks like crazy. I'm going to guess that some of them, looking for someone to blame other than their own selves, will possibly try to sue twitter to get their money back.

Probably cost a lot of people a lot of money that will learn the hard way to check more than one source next time... ooops! Looks like some Prince from Nigeria just sent them an email and they'll get that money back before the week is out, should show up in the bank about the same time that Viagra on sale in Mexico arrives.

All humor aside, while twitter can be a very valuable source of fast breaking news it's also known to be a high profile target for hackers, with WordPress coming in a close second, so while Twitter may often be the source of instant news it should be confirmed before taking action on serious news.

cause a tweet = 100% solid and legit.

Off topic somewhat but I had two Twitter accounts in a 3 month span and both were hacked. Each time Twitter sent me notice the accounts had been hacked and suggested shutting them down. Apparently it's a very hackable platform for all types of mischief.

One of our too big to fail institutions probably made a lot of money with that dip in the markets.

Two step authentication. I'm using pretty much everywhere now, dunno why they don't implement.

Don't believe what you see, hear, feel, taste or see in Twitter?

Just another reason that I do not like twitter. That and it is ruining people's ability to write.

Just another reason that I do not like twitter.

OK, don't blame that on Twitter because Gmail and Facebook is just as bad and thanks to their last hacking of Facebook I get tons of spam with names of people I know because they stole it from Facebook, and then we have the Swiss cheese security hole called WordPress you all use despite the fact it gets hacked over and over so don't go all "i hate twitter" because Twitter is wonderful and connects the population of the planet like nothing before but it has problems like most anything else and they will be resolved over time.

Perhaps blame it on all the kiddies being hired to program instead of seasoned engineers and they get hacked because these kids don't know how to secure code the way us old timers go but they'd rather be penny wise saving a little salary and pound foolish when they get bad PR over and over than maybe wouldn't happen if seasoned engineers did the work.

Not to mention Agile development cycles which play a major role in these problems.

Also, OOPS is not an acronym for Object Oriented Programming, OOPS is "OOPS! I left a major security hole in the software" which inexperience and lack of code review caused and a serious amount of upfront design (old school) and SQA (software quality assurance) would've avoided in the first place.

Last but not least, they need BOT BLOCKING to stop automated attacks on accounts as I'm not sure how they're hacking in but 20+ unauthorized accesses, assuming it's some kind of dictionary attack, should shut down the account and ping your cell phone to unlock it at that point.

But I drone on, Twitter could easily be secured but the kids won't hire the people that can actually do the job, let them suffer, not my problem, blah.

That and it is ruining people's ability to write.

Regarding that point they're teaching people to be concise instead of blathering on endlessly and not getting to the point, like this post. People, esp. those in business, need to learn how to be succinct in communications so you get your point across with minimal effort, are clearly understood, and everyone knows what you mean. If I were to Tweet my point I would've succinctly said "Twitter teaches people to separate the signal from the noise in their communications"

As a matter of fact, for an entrepreneur of which there are many on WebmasterWorld, Twitter skills probably prepare them better for the elevator pitch where you only have the length of time to tell a prospective investor about your product in the time it takes for an elevator ride.

People have managed to describe their product in a single Tweet effectively which is even more space than you get in Google AdWords to advertise the same product.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 4:02 pm (utc) on Apr 25, 2013]

they're teaching people to be concise instead of blathering on endlessly and not getting to the point

Have you read some people's tweets? They abbreviate incorrectly and misspell words to squeeze them into the character limit.

I really wish Twitter would implement two-step authentication, just like Google has done. Would stop a lot of accounts from being hacked...

They abbreviate incorrectly and misspell words to squeeze them into the character limit.

I didn't say it would make them any smarter. Whether they are Tweeting or posting long winded messages elsewhere, stupid is as stupid does regardless of the character count.

I really wish Twitter would implement two-step authentication, just like Google has done. Would stop a lot of accounts from being hacked...

While that's a stronger security method it's not uncrackable.

Another simple solution is to only allow login and access per account based on the geo-location of the account and it's typical pattern of access, whether it's static, mobile or in transit. For a minimum, for a US-based account why should anyone from China, Russia or the Middle-East be attempting to login? At a minimum, give us the ability to lock or unlock our accounts based on geo-location so people that only use it from a single country can lock out all the bad guys hacking from around the globe.

If I'm just tweeting from home, office and my cell phone those services should be all that can access my account, Comcast and Sprint, nothing more unless I authorize it.

Twitter could give us controls to make it easy to set access security levels and block access for idiots trying to get into these accounts would be a thing of the past.

Celebrities, the most often hacked, would be thrilled.

Then the hackers would have to focus on gaining access to the Twitter servers directly which is probably a more daunting task.

#1 - Hacked is the wrong word here, trust is probably the right word in as the wrong person was trusted with the password or their computer was compromised and the password was obtained that way. Nobody directly hacked Twitter.

#2 - This was probably a test. What will happen if someone uses an approved Twitter account to spread propaganda? One way to know for certain is to run a test. This was one(intentional or not) that can be learned from.

#1 - Hacked is the wrong word here, trust is probably the right word in as the wrong person was trusted with the password or their computer was compromised and the password was obtained that way. Nobody directly hacked Twitter.

I believe how it's usually done is a form of phishing, where someone on twitter is enticed into clicking on a link they shouldn't click on.

Yes, it's most likley a phishing issue that resulted in the account being hijacked. It seems to have happened too often, and every account, not just high profile, should be wary of the risks.

The best part was when all the naive people that took that news without any confirmation and started selling off stocks like crazy. I'm going to guess that some of them, looking for someone to blame other than their own selves, will possibly try to sue twitter to get their money back.

High frequency trading my friend. It accounts for nearly 80% of all stock market volume today. Any glitch in the news and it reacts within miliseconds. In this case, resulting in a lot of stop loss trips and further selling.

It's frightening to see just how fragile our economy is these days - and how gullible people have become.

It's frightening to see just how fragile our economy is these days - and how gullible people have become.

People haven't become gullible, having them all on the internet just exposed the sheer numbers of the gullible which was harder to assess previously.

The stock market fiasco was mostly caused by automatic trading systems looking for certain phrases in the news and if this was a test to see the impact bad news would have on our economy, then it wasn't a huge success IMO.

I this was someone just messing around or looking to embarrass us a little and give us a chance to fix the problem like the white hat hackers do with vulnerabilities by telling the software company about the problem before releasing it to the wild.

The people that plan to do serious harm don't show their cards and let us plug holes in the system. If they run a test it might be something like a blank tweet just to make sure it works, something nobody would even pay attention to look at, and they'd probably delete it as quickly as possible if they could do that to make sure it remained unnoticed.

When they drop the hammer it'll be more than just a tweet, and it'll probably come from multiple sources and look legit as this smelled wrong from the start. We turned on the TV and the major news channels have people camped at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and there was nothing on TV.

Don't believe what you see, hear, feel, taste or see in Twitter?

The signal to noise ratio is what it is.