In the same vein as Elliot Ness suggested to “Follow the money…” in order to nab the bad guys, I was following the tweets this morning to find some rather disturbing news for the Bird House. With thanks to @leplan and Globalthoughtz.com, I received news that changing passwords may not be a good security measure for the time being. According to Twitter Status (covered both in All a Twitter and Sams Teach Yourself Twitter in Ten Minutes):

We’re currently researching reports from users who are locked out after trying to reset their passwords or change their email address or user names.  This seems to affect new users as well as long term users; we do not advise changing your user name, email address, or password at this time.  We will update Status with more news as it becomes available.

That was yesterday evening, and still no updates at the time of this posting.

As I will be talking about at Blogworld this week, we all have to be careful concerning Phishing scams, spammers, and password protection. This recent development has me curious as to what is happening back at the Mother Ship but also reinforces exactly how important it is to check and double-check the Twitter Status blog. It remains one of the best ways to keep track of how the Twitterverse is behaving.

I am also breathing a bit easier, knowing Twitter is on top of this serious issue. With their incredible popularity and for offering this service for free (and keeping it so), security is an issue that must be address. It is rarely talked about (until something goes wrong), and this report from Twitter.com assures me as a user that they are not taking this lightly.

Some quick tips until this matter is resolved:

• Do not click on links from people you do not recognize nor follow in your networks
• If you are using TweetDeck, use the URL preview function as a precaution to see where the link leads
• If a link asks for your password, don’t give it. (Common sense, you would think, but…)

We all must think smart and remain safe when tweeting. Sure, it’s only 140 characters; but a lot can happen within a tweet exchange. Hang on to the password for now; and make sure you keep hanging on to it, especially when someone is asking for it.