Twitter warns media against further hacks

Meanwhile, federal financial market regulators meeting in Washington discussed risks to the financial market from such cyber-attacks on social media channels.
In a memo sent to hundreds of media outlets and posted on the Buzzfeed.com website, the internet company said that the hacking incidents appeared to have stemmed from "spear phishing" attacks that masquerade as legitimate emails targeting the journalists running media organizations' Twitter accounts.
The advisory said that organizations should use a dedicated computer to post to Twitter to reduce the chances of a malware infection and should "minimize the number of people" with access to accounts to prevent human error.
"There have been several recent incidents of high-profile news and media Twitter handles being compromised. We believe that these attacks will continue, and that news and media organizations will continue to be high value targets to hackers," the memo stated.
Twitter advised users to use strong passwords at least 20 characters long to access the service and different passwords for their email accounts.
Twitter hit the headlines last week when the main feed of The Associated Press was hacked by a group called the Syrian Electronic Army, and a bogus message was posted about an attack on the White House. Organizations such as CBS, the BBC, The Guardian and football governing body FIFA have had their Twitter feeds hacked in recent weeks.
The AP incident caused the benchmark Standard and Poor's 500 index to drop by about 1 per cent in the three minutes before the news wire refuted the hacked report. The stock-market gauge recovered its original level within the next three minutes.//DPA