Mrs Piper recently discovered she’s following over 200 Twitter accounts. She’s not signed up for any of them.
Any idea how that could have happened? Has she been hacked in some way?
There’s this fairly recently, although it’s not really Twitter being hacked from the looks of it, just credentials gathered through keyloggers.
You can check out your wife’s account at https://haveibeenpwned.com/ which will tell you if her username is associated with any known breaches.
It’s not difficult to imagine how it happened. If I either get a list of Twitter account names and passwords, or hack into Twitter myself and find them, I can then log in as someone else and follow as many Twitter accounts as I want. I don’t know if Twitter is any more susceptible to this than any other social media company, but if someone can successfully hack into the NSA then any company’s customer data is at risk.
I think the more interesting question is why would someone do this? Who does it benefit?
Somehow, somebody other than myself sent out ONE, spam tweet from my account. When I found out, I deleted the tweet, changed my password, and have never had the problem again.