Miliband hacked on Twitter

INSECURITY ANALYST Graham Cluley has some words of advice for Ed Miliband, the UK cabinet minister who allowed himself to be hacked on Twitter.

Cluley blogged about the unfortunate MP warning him, and anyone else foolish enough to fall for the scam, to have an urgent review of their personal security.

Cluley said, "Ed Miliband MP, the high profile British Secretary for Energy and Climate Change, has fallen victim to the current swathe of phishing attacks sweeping the Twitter system. Mr Miliband, who is a member of Gordon Brown's cabinet, appears to have been careless with his computer security and handed his Twitter username and password over to hackers, possibly as a result of the 'This You????' or 'LOL this is funny' attacks we saw earlier this week. As a consequence, earlier today his account posted spam messages promoting potions to improve sexual performance."

One such ministerial message read, "hhey, i've been having better sex and longer with this here," and included a link. We dread to think where the link might take you. Miliband later added, "Oh dear it seems like I've fallen victim to twitter's latest 'phishing' scam", but by then the damage had been done.

However, Cluley said that the minister should make immediate changes to his Skype settings, and consider changing all of his passwords.

"Miliband needs to do more than just tweet an explanation for his bizarre tweets, however," he said. "He also needs to change his password, and think long and hard about whether he is using that same password on any other websites."

"He should also check the Settings/Connections screen on his Twitter account. If there are any third party applications he doesn't recognise listed there, he should revoke their permission to access his account as soon as possible."

To this sage advice, we'll add, "and fast." µ