Brandwise has recently had our twitter account hacked, so I thought I would write this article to help others. Basically someone collected our username and password and now changed the password to keep us from logging in and using our twitter account. I have not noticed any spammy or other type postings as of yet, but not having access to our account is a big pain.
I am thinking maybe our account got hacked through a web site that we tried to promote by tweeting their blog article or something. I would recommend being cautious when doing this. So instead of using your twitter account on other peoples blogs, we are rethinking things and maybe going to only set up new accounts instead of sharing twitter info with any 3rd party site.
You would think that since we were promoting the blog, web site or whatever these people would not want to do something malicious to people trying to help them spread the word. Granted, maybe this is not how we got hacked, but it is the only thing I can figure where we may have been careless with our information.
I have no idea why Twitter is not easier to get a hold of. They have not been able to be reached and I personally have been working on this for days. I have filled out password reset forms for days and done it multiple times with no response. I have also filled out their complaint form and still no luck.
The goal with this article is not put fear into Twitter users, but just help them become more cautious with their account. This is really a pain to try to fix so I hope it does not happen to you.
I am also writing this article to ask for help for anyone who would like to help others and share solutions to this problem please comment on this article so this can be a resource. It would be great if someone know how to contact Twitter via phone and actually talk to a real person.
I’m sure once Twitter support gets around to investigating the issue, they will allow you to reset your password or restore access for you. It is easy to verify via your Twitter account tweet history and this web site, that you are indeed the owner of the account.
I can understand your frustration in waiting for a solution though. I remember numerous times I had to engage MySpace support for issues like this on behalf of clients, and the support response times weren’t always the greatest. I don’t imagine Twitter to be much different, especially considering the volume of users they have. Good luck!
Regards,
Jim
I’m sure once Twitter support gets around to investigating the issue, they will allow you to reset your password or restore access for you. It is easy to verify via your Twitter account tweet history and this web site, that you are indeed the owner of the account.
I can understand your frustration in waiting for a solution though. I remember numerous times I had to engage MySpace support for issues like this on behalf of clients, and the support response times weren’t always the greatest. I don’t imagine Twitter to be much different, especially considering the volume of users they have. Good luck!
Regards,
Jim
Jim,
Thanks for your advice. I will wait it out and see what comes of it. I hope you are correct.
Thanks,
Dale
Jim,
Thanks for your advice. I will wait it out and see what comes of it. I hope you are correct.
Thanks,
Dale
We are happy to post that Twitter has made contact with us about this hack on our account. So it seems to have taken a long time but things are slowly resolving. If your account has been hacked, here is a link to help get this problem fixed – http://help.twitter.com/forums/10713/entries/31796.
We hope this helps. Stay patient is the lesson learned here. Hopefully our account will be back up and running in the next day or so.
We are happy to post that Twitter has made contact with us about this hack on our account. So it seems to have taken a long time but things are slowly resolving. If your account has been hacked, here is a link to help get this problem fixed – http://help.twitter.com/forums/10713/entries/31796.
We hope this helps. Stay patient is the lesson learned here. Hopefully our account will be back up and running in the next day or so.
Working on this for the next month, we realized we were not hacked. So please disregard this warning. Do however note the the true problem was due to our email hosts spam filter was so high that we were unable to get any email from Twitter. After several months of trying to fix this before our account went down, Twitter gave us notice to change our email. We did this several times, but we always changed it to our business email address which Twitter was unable to connect with.
So if you start getting a warning about Twitter being unable to connect to your email account, than talk to your email provider first. This might be the best way to get things straightened out. Hopefully if you do have to go through this, you get it figured out in a day or two instead of being down for a month as we were.
Good luck!
Working on this for the next month, we realized we were not hacked. So please disregard this warning. Do however note the the true problem was due to our email hosts spam filter was so high that we were unable to get any email from Twitter. After several months of trying to fix this before our account went down, Twitter gave us notice to change our email. We did this several times, but we always changed it to our business email address which Twitter was unable to connect with.
So if you start getting a warning about Twitter being unable to connect to your email account, than talk to your email provider first. This might be the best way to get things straightened out. Hopefully if you do have to go through this, you get it figured out in a day or two instead of being down for a month as we were.
Good luck!