In what is being hailed a model of fast response, the Labour Party moved swiftly last night to regain control of the Twitter account of its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, following a hack.
According to the BBC, the attack happened shortly after 9pm GMT and allowed the attacker to broadcast four embarrassing tweets including one that said: “davey cameron is a pie”.
Corbyn's team moved quickly to regain control of the account and delete the tweets.
Despite the swift response, questions were being asked as to how the account was hacked in the first place.
Richard Cassidy, technical director EMEA at Alert Logic said: “Securing any social media account online requires close attention to the authentication to automated tools that are able to update those accounts, in addition to very strong 2FA [two-factor authentication] to the direct account.”
Cassidy added: “We live in a world where we strive to be more social media active and as a result we turn to automated bots to re-tweet or post stories of interest, or use other online tools to automatically repost organisational messages/updates from other media sites to our own social media accounts. It's no wonder therefore that being able to monitor and control all points of input is a nigh-on impossible task. Any high profile government party accounts should really have a far more strict level of automation control to limit exposure to the kind of tweet infiltration seen by the Labour Party account; the more high profile your social media account is, the more stringent one should be on how/who/what can update it.”
