Twitter Security Head Michael Coates Urges Users To Enforce Stronger Passwords, Jack Up Security Authentication

First Posted: Jun 11, 2016 07:56 AM EDT

The week saw a lot of top personalities falling prey to hackers, seeing their social media accounts breached. Among the people who fell prey were Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and celebrity Kylie Jenner.

Seeing that botch were high profile individuals, normal beings may end up thinking that they are the least ones that may end up as the next victim. That was before word came out that over 32 million Twitter credentials that included passwords surfaced.

Does this now raise the alarm to re-check your Facebook, LinkedIn or even Twitter account and change passwords? Some may have already done so by now but Twitter Trust and Security Officer Michael Coates believes that there should be more to that.

As far as Twitter is concerned, Coates urges users to enable the two-factor account authentication which would force users to employ an additional login verification process to ramp up security on their social media account.

Other than that, Coates reminds users a thing or two about passwords. One is that individuals should not use the same password on other accounts. An example was that of Zuckerberg’s case.

Per our previous post, it was mentioned how the Facebook founder’s LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter accounts were hacked in what was tied up to a LinkedIn data leak that happened back in 2012. When Zuckerberg’s account was hacked, the Facebook mogul was forced to change his passwords.

Coates advises users to seek aid from password manager apps like 1Password or LastPass to ensure that their passwords are unique and secure to douse any potential mischief that hackers would be up to.

Twitter Comes Clean, Blames Hacked Sites and Malware

The social media outlet Twitter has been singled out as the main target but the company has denied such claims. Coates claims that they have already made investigations on the issue and said that the breaches may have originated from other sites or through malware.

"In each of the recent password disclosures, we cross-checked the data with our records," he wrote. "As a result, a number of Twitter accounts were identified for extra protection. Accounts with direct password exposure were locked and require a password reset by the account owner."