The Advent of social networking websites has brought with it, some good and some bad things. The ‘good things‘ are the ability of meet new people around the globe, marketing products, getting new jobs and many more. The main ‘bad thing‘ is the security aspect of it. Twitter and many other social networking websites have the same problem, they can be easily hacked. I still believe that twitter is still safer from other networking websites.

The only way to be more secure is to use manual methods to increase the security.  I, like many other twitter users have suffered from an attack which was may be due to the reason that I didn’t take the security of my account very seriously.  The hacker made use of my reputation and started posting x-rated and controversial tweets via my account. I got to know about it, when i got angry and weird responses from my followers. With the help of my friends on twitter, I was able to revive my account in minutes and i tried to  salvage my reputation, but some damage had already been done to it. The main question is that how can you prevent yourself from this mess? The answer is by following some simple steps, which although does not guarantee total security, but it does decrease the probability of being attacked by a hacker.

1. Strong Password

Most of the hackers, are able to determine a password easily if it is very short or if it contains the date of birth, or your favorite actor or any other favorite. So, in order to increase the security, the password should be really strong. Passwords that contain letters (in caps as well as in small case) and numbers and special symbols are considered to be very strong.  Twitter displays the password strength on the right hand side of the password. You can use it to check whether your password is strong enough. Another good technique would be to change your password regularly.

2. OAuth

OAuth is the authentication which twitter uses to authenticate third party apps. Twitter gives this feature only to trusted apps. Make sure you use apps which are using OAuth service for authentication. If you have unintentionally approved an application, then you can always revoke access, by going to the Settings>Connections and then clicking on Revoke Access for that particular app.

3. Trusted Apps

It is preferable, if you use trusted applications. Applications like:

1. Hootsuite
2. Cotweet
3. Tweetie
4. TweetDeck
5. Seesmic

and many more applications which are very popular among twitter users.

4. Don’t use Office Networks

Login to your twitter account, only when you are using it on your home computer. Don’t use it on your office or college network. These networks are prone to harmful attacks and you may end up in getting your account hacked.

5. Protect Your Password

Don’t ever give your password to anyone. This applies to apps which require to fill your username and password every time. These apps try to lure you into giving them the key to your account. Then they would use your account for their website or product promotion.

In the end, I would like to conclude that twitter is not a very safe website, but if you are careful and keep your account shielded, it can serve a great purpose for you and your organization.