Russian Celebrity Has Her Twitter Account Stolen, Threatens Court Trial

March 04, 2011 | Svetlana Gladkova

Russian celebrities are not really that different from every other celebrity in the world in their hunt for PR. Logically, many of them quickly jumped on the Twitter bandwagon when they realized the PR power of it. Tina Kandelaki, a TV personality, is one of the most active Twitter users among Russian celebrities as she reports quite a number of her daily events to more than 50 thousand of followers. And today she has had her account hacked.

The irony of the entire story is that the account has not even been stolen by some clever hacker (and we are supposed to have plenty of them in Russia) – it was just a journalist. Allegedly he wanted to get a comment from Tina on a now revived political issue she was involved with a few years ago but when he got none (because of her busy schedule or unwillingness to comment – does not matter), he decided to attract her attention in this pretty unusual manner.
The account is told to have been controlled by the journalist-hacker for a few hours. After managing to log in under the celebrity’s account, he has promptly changed the password to lock the owner out of her account. The only problem was that he has not changed the email linked to the account so Tina has managed to gain control of the account a few hours later. Over the hours, the journalist has allegedly posted 3 updates there regarding her unwillingness to provide a comment.
I personally do not think there is anything specifically extraordinary about someone hacking someone else’s account on a social network but still this issue poses a serious question given Twitter popularity today. It is pretty obvious that whoever manages to hack an account of a person with a significant number of followers will be able to broadcast messages that will be retweeted and eventually reach many-many eyes of the people who trust the person who seems to be their author. And it could have nothing to do with truth at the same time!

It is not clear yet what the reason for the hack was – a terrifically simple password for Tina’s account or some vulnerability of Twitter. I am inclined to blame Tina and her lack of attention in choosing a password because the suspect does not seem to be a hacker experienced in breaking into websites – he is a journalist who could probably only try a few meaningful and simple passwords to get in – and succeeded.

Or of course he could also hire someone way more professional – and in this case it could probably not be Tina’s fault but this scenario at the same time poses interesting questions regarding Twitter security. In fact, I would expect Tina to be pretty careful with her online presence given her obsession with the latest and greatest in technology. For example, she was the first among the Russian people I follow on Twitter to get her hands on an iPad of her own a few days after it became available in the US and sounded extremely excited expecting the flight from New York bringing the gadget to her. I would expect someone with this interest in technology to know what a secure password is and how to use it.

Anyway, the celebrity is now planning to appeal to the police for them to deal with the incident. And whoever actually hacked the account or whatever the reason, it will probably be the first trial about stealing Twitter accounts in Russia (there has already been some on local social networks) and it will be interesting to see if Twitter team chooses to cooperate with Russian law enforcement authorities now.

in reference to: Russian Celebrity Has Her Twitter Account Stolen, Threatens Court Trial | Profy | Internet news and commentary (view on Google Sidewiki)