Twitter

Twitter is trying out a tweet-enhancing feature that connects 140-character messages to longer form stories mentioning them in an apparent effort to add context to real-time bursts of information.

Sunday, Twitter user Mikko Hypponen noticed that one of his tweets included a list of media sites where the tweet was embedded. The feature, entitled "embedded on these websites," lists the websites' names, includes article headlines, and links through to destination URLs, based on the screenshot shared by Hypponen.

Tom Coates, a former Yahoo employee and current co-founder and principal at Internet-of-things stealth startup Product Club, hacked his house in San Francisco so he could remotely monitor it via Twitter, Rachel Metz of MIT Technology Review reports.

The reason why a house would need its own Twitter feed may be hard to grasp at first, but it represents a growing trend in Internet-connected devices.

Going a week without a major brand having its Twitter account compromised was starting to become a rare occurrence. Critics and users alike repeatedly called upon Twitter to release two-factor (or step) authentication. The added layer of security requires you to enter your password, and then a subsequent six-digit access anytime you try to log into Twitter. The short code is sent via text message to your cell phone, which means that any would-be hackers would need to not only crack your password, but to also have physical possession of your cell phone.

When it comes to parody news site the Onion, it's hard to tell if anything it publishes is real. So, after the site's Twitter feed had several tweets on Monday saying "The Syrian Electronic Army Was Here" and other similar messages, few people batted an eyelash.

However, both the Syrian Electronic Army and the Onion have confirmed that indeed the site's Twitter account was hacked, according to The New York Times.

Twitter knows that many high-profile accounts have suffered at the hands of hackers in recent days, but is putting much of the onus of responsibility on the account holders themselves.

On Monday, Twitter sent a memo to major media and news outlets about the threat -- if they hadn't known already or at least reported on some of them -- and noted that it believed these "attacks will continue." (Buzzfeed posted the memo in full.)

American media suffered another black eye Tuesday afternoon when U.S. stock markets briefly went into a tailspin after the Associated Press's Twitter account was hijacked and used to broadcast this false message: "Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured."

CBS confirmed that three of its Twitter accounts, including that of popular show 60 Minutes, were hacked.

It is largely believed that the accounts were compromised by Syrian Electronic Army, though they haven’t been officially named as the perpetrators. Some of the tweets sent out from these accounts do point at Syrians, take for example this tweet posted on 60 Minutes account saying: The Syrian army’s fight is your fight. The Syrian army fights for all humanity. The Syrian Electronic Army has previously, reportedly, compromised Twitter accounts of NPR, Reuters and BBC.

Twitter's head of security Bob Lord gave a talk at Hack in the Box 2013 Amsterdam describing Twitter's efforts to nurture a security culture inside the company. In the light of the recent attack that resulted in 250,000 accounts being possibly compromised, security is a hot topic at Twitter.

It's not just internal security, Twitter promised to beef up security for users as well. One obvious way of doing that is by enabling two-step or two-factor authentication. Several other large companies, starting with Google, have done that already.

Security awareness training is an issue that has been and continues to be hotly debated both online and offline.

It is also a topic that seems a little out of place at the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam, but Bob Lord, Director of Information Security at Twitter, has raised some interesting points in his Thursday's keynote in which he shared his company's rather successful experiments regarding the matter.

A feature in the Twitter API (application programming interface) can be abused by attackers to launch credible social engineering attacks that would give them a high chance of hijacking user accounts, a mobile application developer revealed Wednesday at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam.