But what is twitter? For all those who are not following @sbharatam‘s iiwisdomseries on Twitter, it is a micro-blogging tool which acts like your personal radio station where you can broadcast live by sending short messages or (tweets) whenever you like on whatever you want. It is like instant messaging with more widespread visibility.

I have seen many a times twittizens do not realise when they give their account details for better services to potential hackers. Can you ever imagine that your favorite twitter account being hacked? You will not have access to your profile, nor will you be able to find out whats your friends are currently tweeting. Isnt that frustrating!!

Do you offer a helping hand to the hackers trying to get an easy access to your twitter account?

It may sound a bit strange, but the answer is “Yes”.  Lets take an instance. I want a software for twitter that can provide me the best way of using Twitter. I searched for the same at a popular search engine and found out Tweetdeck which is a free twitter application which can be installed in various OS Platforms Windows, Linux and Mac. At any point during downloading the application it can ask you for your twitter credentials, without thinking much I give my password and username details. This is where we are at a potential risk of having our accounts hacked.

There are countless third party applications available on the web promising you better user experiences on your twitter account. These applications are free to use and tends to have an access of your account through Twitter connections, whenever you accept and give them the permission to post on your behalf of your twitter account, you are allowing a potential hacker to hack your account.

How do you protect your Twitter Account?

In order to protect your twitter account from getting hacked, its always advisable to use the least number of third party applications while using your Twitter. Incase, you happen to use some third party application, do ensure that you verify the nature of the third party twitter application and ensure that its not a plot to hack your account. At the same time, do keep a note of the applications, which you granted the access to your account. You may find them in details at http://twitter.com/settings/connections

PS: The instances used in the above post have been used to explain you how serious this issue is. By no means, we did want to explain that Twitterdeck or its related tools are hacking instruments.