How many times you logged in your twitter account and found some strange message twittered like “hey, visit my site” or something you never twittered, one shiny day you find 2000 porn links in your twitter account and it takes time to delete them all. Or maybe your account suspended and you really don’t understand why twitter bots blocked your account.

The answer is simple, your twitter account was hijacked. Twitter is a cool microblogging platform and it uses secured technology to store your twitter username and password.  The only one person guilty for account suspention or strange and inpropriate posts is you.

Who might be interested in your twitter username and password ?

There are lots of guys trying to make a few bucks from affiliate programs, traffic and software testing. They might be interested in your account to spam your followers and to get some extra traffic to their websites.

How they can steal my username and password ?

They will do it simple, and scammers don’t need any advanced programmers knowledge.  Most popular ways are :

• Phishing – You are getting some message from your friend – “Check out my cool site”, you are clicking the link and twitter login page opened. You are trying to enter your username and password again and again and nothing happens. The password you entered was just sent to scammer’s email address or stored in his database and he will use it later to promote his website.  Always check twitter login url in your browser address bar it should be twitter.com, www.twitter.com, twitter.com/home. The url should contain .com extension. The examples of phishing page url is  http://twitter.page.com or http://twitter.cc the pages will look exactly as twitter home page, but it’s not twitter.
• twitter tools – We all like twitter tools to get some more twitter followers. But sometimes there are some fake twitter tools, and they will not work in most of the cases. Once you enter your username and password in some twitter tool it may be stored in database or just sent to tools developer email. You never know how will they use your twitter private information. You should always check if the tool is secure and it should be listed on twitter pbworks. For example, feald twitter tools requires your password, feald twitter application is secure to use, because it not stores your private information and it is listed on twitter pbworks

How to prevent twitter username and password fraud ?

Once you use or try some new web application, change your twitter password. If you have twitter business account, you should change your twitter password once a few days at least. The simpliest way is to change it by removing or adding some letter, for example if your password “mike12″, change it to “mike12a” and scammers will not be able to use your password again.