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You cannot trust social media to keep your private data safe: Story of a Twitter vulnerability

Explore the challenges of social media cybersecurity and learn how to protect your online presence effectively.

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You cannot trust social media to keep your private data safe: Story of a Twitter vulnerability

I‘m always worried about the private information I have online. Maybe this is because I have been hacking for a long time, and I know everything can be hacked. This makes me a bit paranoid. I have never trusted web sites to keep my private information safe, and nowadays it is impossible to not have private information published on the web, such as a social media web site. Sooner or later you could get hacked, this is a fact.

Last week I had a very interesting experience.

I was testing a web application that is under development. This application had an option to allow me to sign into Twitter. If I selected this option, the application would have access to my Twitter public feed (such as reading Tweets from my timeline and seeing who I follow). In addition, the application would have been able to access Twitter functionality on my behalf (such as following new people, updating my profile, posting Tweets for me). However, it wouldn’t have access to my private Twitter information (such as direct messages and more importantly my password). I knew this to be true because of the following information that is displayed on Twitter’s web page for “Signing in with Twitter”:

Check third-party applications permissions here: https://twitter.com/settings/applications

If you see an application that has access to your direct messages and you never authorized it, then revoke it immediately.

Twitter shares your DMs without authorization, check 3rd party application permissions https://www.ioactive.com/you-can-not-trust-social-media-twitter-vulnerable/ #ProtectYourPrivacy (Please RT)

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