NBC News Twitter Account Gets Hacked

Sites include nbc.com , Twitter.com . Published on September 15th, 2011. Written by Anthony West.

Another big-name Twitter account has been hacked. This time it’s news giant NBC News, and what’s even more shocking is what’s been done as a result of the hacking.

According to reports, Hackers took control of NBC’s Twitter account and posted false information regarding an attack on Ground Zero. Clearly an attempt to undermine September 11 observations, the attack highlights yet again the ease at which Twitter security can be compromised. It was no more than 2 months ago that Fox News had its account hacked and messages announcing the death of Barack Obama posted on Twitter.

This sort of thing is happening way too often and with Twitter rolling out improved platform access for big name brands, these security lapses will certainly not help things. Imagine for instance if Pepsi for had their account compromised and millions of unsavory tweets were sent out to its followers. This would no doubt damage the image of Pepsi and almost certainly damage the business relationship between it and Twitter.

Advertising revenue is also just a small part of the possible problems Twitter might have unless it arrests these rather frequent attacks on its platform. A much wider problem is user trust in the platform. If users feel that they are easy targets, they will certainly not engage or use Twitter. It was only a few days ago that Twitter announced 100 million active users; clearly breaches like these will undermine that level of growth.

Twitter really needs to clean up its act.

Do you think Twitter is really dropping the ball on user account security? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.