The irate customer complained “PayPal froze all my money for no reason. The hacker criticized the eBay subsidiary in offensive language, including its poor security, among other things and directed people to PayPal Sucks, a website that aims to expose “the nightmare of doing business” through PayPal.
It is not yet known whether the customer has any connection to paypalsucks.com, which was registered in 2000 and has remained under the same owner since.
The Guardian posted, “ PayPal UK has emphasized that it was only the Twitter account, and not any of the sensitive customer systems with credit card or other data that had been breached.”
Twitter accounts are protected by a simple password which can sometimes be guessed or stolen and this measn the service can be accessed by anyone with that password.
Earlier this week the Twitter account of Fox News politics was hacked by a group with links to the Anonymous hacker collective and used to falsely claim that Barack Obama had been assassinated.
One way to prevent such account hacking would be to introduce ‘two-factor authentication’ to certain accounts. This would require anyone who tried to log in from a different computer, or after a specific delay, to get an authentication code sent from Twitter to a mobile phone or use a preset code. The Guardian had asked Twitter whether it plans to introduce this, but did not receive any response.
In a tweet after regaining control of the account, PayPal apologized and said it had the account under control. PayPal U.K. also deleted the messages from the hacker.
A PCWorld post says, “Twitter is being increasingly used by businesses, news outlets, governments, and politicians to communicate to people, and the two high-profile hacks this week will likely raise doubts about the security of the Twitter platform for these kind of communications.”
eBay-owned PayPal has more than 100m credit card accounts.