Marc's Blog

It was definitely an experience I will never forget. With over 60,000 followers at the time, I had no control over what my followers would see when they clicked on my links. Links that were supposed to lead to my blog posts led to a porn site. Those two days were very rough. I wrote a blog post about how you could avoid getting hacked before getting hacked in the first place, but I decided to learn how to avoid getting hacked after my account got hacked (bad move on my part). The entire experience did allow me to learn several lessons:

1. The internet is dangerous and unsecure which makes your reputation fragile. If universities decided to review my Twitter account on the day the hackings took place, I would have been rejected by many if not all of them. Two days of activity that were not my fault would have ruined my reputation. I am sure some people unfollowed me when they saw the spam. It was not my intention to spam people, but in the end, a hacker was able to damage my reputation in the eyes of some people. That is a harsh way to look at it, but it’s hard to see why that would not be true.
2. We need to speak up about our problems. With no solution in sight, I was scared to tell everyone that my account had been hacked. As far as I knew, it could have taken several weeks or even months for my account to get back to normal. I tried contacting Twitter, but with this particular issue, contacting them is almost as challenging as using a Google tool that got updated a few days ago. I decided that the only solution would be for me to ask my followers and notify them about the issue. With fear and bravery intertwined into one, I sent out a series of tweets telling over 60,000 people that my account had been hacked. In the end, all of the people who contacted me were optimistic and very helpful. These people helped me reach a solution and told me whether they were redirected to my blog or not. I got to make some new friends, and when my Twitter account got unhacked, more people visited my blog. It was amazing, and it only happened because I spoke up.
3. Be prepared for the storm before it hits. The hack hit like a storm, and I was unprepared. What could have taken a few minutes took me two days. Although you should not spend too much time preparing for the storm, you should know what to do when the storm comes and how to stop it before it inflicts a lot of damage.
4. People support each other when both are against a common enemy. I highly doubt there is a single person who really wants his/her Twitter account to get hacked. When my Twitter account got hacked, some of the people supported me because they would not like it if their account got hacked. By identifying a common enemy, you will be able to create a team that supports each other with a common goal: taking down the enemy. Applying this to more than a hacked Twitter accounts, common enemies can include but are not limited to debt, procrastination, and stress.

I wanted to be sure that something came out of the two day experience of my hacked Twitter account. I was able to come up with 4 lessons. Although I am sure I could have come up with more lessons, these are the main lessons that you need to take away from my experience.

There is a crazy world of hackers out there that affect thousands (or even millions) of people on Twitter. The people who hacked Donald Trump and Burger King’s accounts taught us how important security is. However, many people have the, “That won’t happen to me” attitude towards a problem that has spread across numerous accounts. From “Lol I saw this bad picture of you” to “I can’t believe this is you,” spam has made a notorious splash into the social network.

You do not want to wait for your account to get hacked until you take action. Sadly, I did not take action until my account got hacked. It was a messy two days where I lost hundreds of visitors who were redirected to porn sites when they clicked on links to my blog posts. Those two days were very bad indeed (luckily, I had a good track race, so that made me feel better about myself).

Do not make the mistake of ignoring this blog post. The tips here will help make your Twitter account safer. You do not want to be reading this blog post when your Twitter account gets hacked. You will want to read this blog post right now and implement the tactics here so your account never gets hacked in the first place. Thee are the 3 quick and easy ways to make your Twitter account safer.

1. You need a (much) stronger password. Your password needs to be more than 8 characters long. In my opinion, everyone’s password should be at least 20 characters and have symbols to make things more confusing for the hacker. The longer your password is, the less likely a hacker is to figure it out.
2. Change your password every month. Although this will be hard for some people to remember, changing your password every month is well worth it. Heartbleed and the NSA have revealed to us how not so secret our information is. Maybe when the NSA keeps our data safe and secure, we would not have to change our passwords every month. However, hackers will still find ways to discover your password which is why you should change it every month. In a fascinating blog post from CopyBlogger, they mentioned that their blog gets 50,000-180,000 unauthorized logins every day. That results in over 1 million unauthorized logins every week. By changing your password every month, you will reduce the likelihood of getting hacked.
3. Remove third-party apps that you do not trust. Sometimes, we rush to give access to bad third-party apps by mistake. This was most likely the reason why my account got hacked and sent people to inappropriate content. The problem was quickly resolved when I purged through my list of third-party apps. In order to access your list of third-party apps, go to settings (the gear) and then on the left corner will be “apps.” Clicking on that will allow you to see a list of all of your third-party apps which you could revoke with a click.

Do not wait to implement these tactics until your account gets hacked. Because I waited, I had a race against time in order to find a solution. By waiting for my account to get hacked, I lost 300 visitors. If 1% of those people would have bought one of my books, then that means I lost three sales, but just as important, people who would stick around, read my content, and subscribe to my blog. Learn from my mistake so you will not get hacked, and if you do get hacked, you will know exactly what to do.