Inside LabourStart

Just as our Twitter feed was starting to grow …

A large number of accounts seem to have been compromised in the last 24 hours and I’ve gotten a very large number of identical direct messages from people.  Or apparently coming from people.

The form of the message is identical:

i cant believe this but there are some real nasty things being said about you here [link]

When I got the first one, I assumed it was real — it came from someone I knew, and sometimes (I know this hard to believe), “real nasty things” are said about me on the web.

But it wasn’t real, and he warned me off.

Since then, I’ve gotten a considerable number of email messages from people saying they’ve gotten this same message from us — from the labourstart account on Twitter.

I’m not sure what is causing this, but it’s not resulting in false tweets being sent out in our name.  But direct messages are going out, possibly to all 5,672 supporters of LabourStart on Twitter.  Shit.

So to put a stop to it, I’ve done the following things:

• I’ve changed our password.
• I’ve revoked access to Twitter to all apps that aren’t Apple or Twitter owned.  (These included one app recently installed precisely to prevent this sort of thing – Bitdefender Safego — which at the very least didn’t do its job and may itself have been compromised.)

The latter means that Twitterfeed no longer has access to our account and our feed will not be updated.  As a result of this, I will be looking into resuming use of Twitterfeed on Monday or an alternative – which we were looking for anyway.