Netherlands and Germany have been having disagreements with Turkey for a while now and the quarrel has entered one specific social networking site: Twitter. If you follow various celebs, news providers and other accounts that have a solid amount of subscribers, you might have noticed that offensive tweets have been posted from them. Pro-Turkish statements that were published quickly raised questions whether hundreds of seemingly decent Twitter members could possibly post inappropriate content, featuring Nazi swastikas. Soon enough it was evident: an attack from hackers released a series of reprehensible tweets.
This could be indicated as Turkish propaganda, slandering Germany and Netherlands. Keywords like “Nazi Germany” or “Nazi Holland” were noticed in the posted tweets. All of them were written in the Turkish language and most of the people that own the hacked accounts do not know a word in Turkish. Some of them quickly posted that they had nothing to do with the published tweets. Messages also contained a link to Youtube.com which presented a video of the president of Turkey, Recep Erdoğan. Twitter accounts that were hacked into also underwent changes as crooks decided to change profile photos to a Turkish flag.
A service called Twitter Counter indicated that their software allowed hackers to invade private Twitter accounts. Thanks to a vulnerability, detected in the software, pro-Turkish programmers were able to widely distribute offensive messages. Most of the applications that are created to enhance the usage of Twitter do not get access to such information as credentials. However, Twitter Counter had such a luxury and hackers took advantage of it. Because of the recent incident, this privilege has been taken away. If crooks managed to exploit Twitter Counter for their benefit, we think that such measures were absolutely necessary to reassure that Twitter accounts would be safe.
It is yet unknown which group of hackers is responsible for the attack. Our guess is that hackers, supporting Turkey, will be discovered as the culprits. Accounts that were hacked have been restored to their normal state. To avoid such invasions, we advise people to check to what applications they give access to their Twitter accounts. If an app is allowed to reach your passwords and usernames, it will mean that if that app gets hacked, crooks will be able to control your account. You can easily check which programs are connected to your account. Try to keep them to a minimum. How can you do this? Click on the round bubble with your profile picture. Then, select Settings and Privacy section. Find “Apps” and choose it. You will be able to see which apps can access your Twiiter account. You can also revoke this privilege.
Source: cbsnews.com.
