Musk's chaotic Twitter: Cybersecurity expert says you should delete your DMs

Nov 22 2022, 9:05 pm

A security expert has warned netizens to delete their Twitter DMs if they want to keep their confidential information secure.

Cyber security analyst Graham Cluley has been sounding the alarm about digital safety in the time of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover.

“It’s time. Delete your Twitter DMs,” Cluley tweeted on Wednesday. “Deleting your DMs doesn’t stop Twitter storing their own copy, but does reduce the ways in which they can screw-up and leave your private messages exposed.”

The warning comes after Musk fired hundreds of Twitter engineers and senior execs over the past few weeks. Cluley believes this has exposed the social media website to cyber attacks. Musk is drastically making changes to Twitter as a platform, too, heightening the risk of a break-in.

Journalists and digital security enthusiasts around the world have been voicing concerns about Twitter’s new approach to verification, and saying it could make the spread of misinformation much, much worse.

Within days of Musk’s Twitter takeover, the use of the N-word on the website went up 500%. Other behaviour that would ordinarily violate community guidelines is also being tolerated, as the website takes a laxer route on content moderation — partly due to staff layoffs.

Cluley has written about the situation on his blog, reminding people that Twitter’s chief information security officer and head of trust and safety have both quit the company, leaving it very vulnerable. He has been discussing the chaos at Twitter on his podcast Smashing Security.

Some users were locked out of the website recently and had their SMS-based two-factor authentication feature disabled automatically, exposing them to losing their information, or worse — having it fall into the wrong hands.

“It sounds like someone was ordered to rip some code out of Twitter, and they simply didn’t understand the complexity of Twitter’s system – the gazillions of dependencies and consequences that just making one change can have on other parts of the site,” writes Cluley.

He adds that the only people likely to understand those links and dependencies between Twitter’s systems — and sound the alarm when something’s off — are very likely people who’ve already been laid off.

Journalists and investigators have been connecting with sources via Twitter DMs for years, exchanging confidential details that, if leaked, could put not only cause an information risk but also endanger people’s lives.

Maybe it’s time to download your Twitter archive and preserve the good memories from this once-good bird app.

Will you be deleting your Twitter DMs? Let us know in the comments.

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