HTTPS enabled by default – nice one Twitter!

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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@gcluley

Twitter wins the award for grooviest website of the day, because of the great move they have announced which will help protect the privacy of millions of users.

Twitter has announced that it has enabled HTTPS by default for all users, which is a particularly good thing if you access Twitter from a public WiFi hotspot, such as a coffee shop or hotel lobby.

If you log into Twitter over unencrypted WiFi – for instance, at an airport lounge or at a conference – and you don’t have HTTPS enabled, then a hacker could sniff your session cookie. And anyone who can sniff your session cookie can pretend to be you.

That means they can post tweets as you or read your private direct messages. And you don’t want that.

Turning on full-time Twitter HTTPS keeps your session cookie encrypted throughout your login session. That’s definitely a good thing.

And don’t imagine that “sniffing session cookies…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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