My Twitter Account Was Hacked

Well, it might have been… but my children, who seem to know a lot more about these things than I do, thought it might have been a virus.

Whatever… the net result was the same.

A variety of direct messages were sent from my Twitter account to people who are (or more accurately I suspect, were) following me.  The first message wasn’t particularly nice, saying something like this:

People are saying bad things about you… click here to find out what they are saying!

The second one was slightly funnier:

I laughed my head off when I saw this picture of you…

Anyway, I think I’ve fixed the problem by changing my password, deactivating and reactivating my account and then running round a church five times at the full moon without thinking about a lemon.

But the thing that was intriguing about the whole experience were the different reactions from people.  I had maybe a couple of hundred followers (all, no doubt, hanging on my every word) and I suppose about 30 responded to me either by email or a direct message via Twitter.

Most of them, it’s true, simply said something like: Your Twitter account has been hacked, you muppet, you need to sort it out.

But others seem to trust me to such an extent that they took the rogue tweets at face value.  A mate who I haven’t spoken with for a few years tweeted me to ask what it was all about and, as a result, I called him and we’re back in touch.

Another guy, who was responding to the ‘Laughed my head off’ tweet was simply the victim of timing.  A picture of him had just been put up on Facebook.  He was receiving an award and the camera angle made it look as though he was standing in a hole.

He responded by saying: ‘Yeah, I know… must make a note to make sure I get presented an award by someone my own height!’

Now I’m not sure what all this is saying about me or Twitter or the scumbag hackers, but how about this for a stab at analysis?:

• There’s was no rancour directed at me for getting hacked – and most people recognised the rogue tweets for what they were… meaning this is a regular occurrence

• Those who didn’t spot them as rogue tweets took what I was saying at face value which means I need to tweet more to get my message out there

• I guess about 25% of the people who were following me read the tweets meaning the reach of Twitter is much greater than I thought

What do you think?  Answers on a post card, or even better to reneemackay@taxassist.co.uk

You can see my other blogs at

www.taxassist.co.uk/reneemackay and

www.enterprisebritain.com