Social media has been the must do for elected officials looking for effective and inexpensive ways to reach out to their districts and their states. But increased outreach on public sites means increased problems with security.
For the last several months, the social networking site Twitter has been overburdened with attacks through its direct messages that say things like “OMG you have to see this video” or other things that come from friends and followers. When the user clicks – the hack begins, and the hackers send direct messages out to your list of followers.
This is the hack that made its way through the US Congress Republican Caucus according to a piece in The Hill.
“Followers of Florida senatorial candidate Marco Rubio were greeted for a portion of this afternoon by tweets advertising a Web site that sells colon cleansing products. Some subscribers of Tennessee gubernatorial candidate Zach Wamp’s Twitter feed similarly received direct messages that them to visit a colon cleansing-related Web site.
Both Republican candidates have since addressed the underlying causes of their hacked accounts and warned subscribers not to click on any suspicious links they may have received.”
Oklahoma’s Attorney General Drew Edmondson’s Twitter account was hacked several times in one week; the same week fellow Oklahoma elected official Rep. Mary Fallin was also hacked. Kansas State Senator Laura Kelly’s MySpace account appeared to be hacked, and laughed about by one of the state’s republican blogs.
Pop singer Britney Spears had both her MySpace and Twitter accounts hacked this week as well,
“Her Twitter feed boasts more than 3.7 million followers and is updated by herself and her “team” of handlers. A message Thursday apologized for “any offense the hacker’s messages caused.”
Spears’ MySpace account was taken over at about the same time.
Hacked messages have gone out from Spears’ Twitter account before.”
While social media sites bring a greater transparency to politics and government, they also bring added risks. The FBI even issued a warning to elected officials in Congress with
“a release today warning users of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and similar sites to beware for a common hacking scheme that is becoming more frequent.”
Rule of thumb is don’t click if it seems weird or unusual.
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