It can happen to anyone.
That’s how Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula described how his Twitter account was”hacked” when crude photographs of a semi-nude woman emerged on his timeline.
“It’s not something new,” he said. He took reasonable steps to protect his account, he said, but what happened to him “can happen to anyone”.
The pictures that appeared on his timeline on Thursday evening showed a woman, ostensibly named Mandisa and from Nigeria, posing seductively in black underwear for the camera.
Mbalula, who has nearly a half million followers, quickly deleted the post after he said he was alerted to it.
Some Twitter posts suggested the woman was a gospel singer.
Arthur Goldstuck, the managing director of World Wide Worx, a technology research organisation, said that “even the most charitable explanation still doesn’t look so great for him (Mbalula)”.
“It’s not easy to hack into a Twitter account unless the user has got very poor security protocols in place such as a password that is easy to guess. That’s the primary way people hack into high-profile accounts.
“They look for the person’s wife’s name, children’s names or even pets. If that’s available anywhere online, they’ll try it.
“Or people get sent a link by someone they don’t follow or know - it can be anything from pornography to revolutionary diets - and when you click on it, that allows someone access to your account.”
These were poor Twitter safety habits, he said.
Numerous websites such as hackTwitter list how easy it is to hack passwords on Twitter in three easy steps or within five minutes.
“How would an old picture from a website in Nigeria land on my timeline is not really an unknown - my account was hacked on Friday,” relayed @MbalulaFikile.
“Realising I was hacked, the best and safe option was to log into Web-Twtter and change the password.”
He started a poll asking his 422 000 followers whether Gareth Cliff, Netwerk24 Adriaan Basson or “Satan himself” had hacked into his account.
Mbalula told his followers that his Facebook and private e-mails had previously been hacked, vowing that that #hackersmustfall and that “attempts will be made to get to the bottom of this and find the hackers”.
While users like @DirkdeVos believed Mbalula’s Twitter account was “perpetually hacked by someone trying hard to discredit him”, other Twitter users were sceptical of Mbalula’s explanation, suggesting he had posted the pictures accidentally.
Pretoria News Weekend