Twitter announces measures to protect accounts of people involved in 2020 Presidential election

Twitter announced that it will adopt new security measures to protect high-profile accounts during the upcoming election in the United States.

Twitter announced new measures to protect high-profile accounts during the upcoming US Presidential election.

The types of accounts that are in this designated group are:

• US Executive Branch and Congress
• US Governors and Secretaries of State
• Presidential campaigns, political parties and candidates with Twitter Election Labels running for US House, US Senate, or Governor
• Major US news outlets and political journalists

Twitter will use an internal notification service to alert owners of accounts associated with people in the above group.

“Voters, political candidates, elected officials and journalists rely on Twitter every day to share and find reliable news and information about the election, and we take our responsibility to them seriously.” reads the post published by the company. “As we learn from the experience of past security incidents and implement changes, we’re also focused on keeping high-profile accounts on Twitter safe and secure during the 2020 US election.”

The platform will provide recommendations about account security measures that the owners of the accounts have to enable to secure their accounts.

One of these measures is the use of strong passwords, the owner of the accounts using weak passwords will be forced to change it.

In order to avoid that threat actors could change the passwords for high-profile accounts, Twitter enabled the password reset protection, this means that users have to confirm their identity via email or phone before resetting the password.

Twitter also recommends owners of high-profile accounts involved in the upcoming US Presidential election to enable two-factor authentication (2FA).

Twitter also plans to roll out more sophisticated detections and alerts features to rapidly respond to suspicious activity.

The company will implement better defenses against account takeover and expedited account recovery support.

“While we’re requiring some accounts do this given the unique sensitivities of the election period, everyone on Twitter can take advantage of these security measures, (and we encourage them to do so!),” continues the announcement. “Implementing these security measures is a critical preventative step, and you will continue to see us introduce new protections and features to help safeguard accounts on Twitter.”

In July, the social media platform suffered one of the biggest cyberattacks in its history, multiple high-profile accounts were hacked, including those of Barak Obama, US presidential candidate Joe Biden, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Uber, and Apple.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Presidential Election)

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