“I hope you respect me: I’m gay #HappySunday.” That was the message that was published on the Twitter of the Real Madrid exporter and the Spanish National Team Iker Casillas yesterday afternoon. According to a subsequent message from the athlete, his account had allegedly been “hacked”, so the message, as he points out, would have been published by a third party.
“Hacked account’. Luckily everything in order. Apologies to all my followers. And of course, more apologies to the LGBT community, “said the exporter two hours after the publication of the first message.
Despite the apologies, there are many who have doubts that the message was indeed shared by a cybercriminal who had accessed their account. During the last hours, the athlete has received harsh messages through social networksprecisely for this reason.
Hacked account. Luckily everything in order. Apologies to all my followers. And of course, more apologies to the LGBT community. ????
– Iker Casillas (@IkerCasillas) October 9, 2022
ABC has contacted Twitter to see if Casillas’ account suffered any incident. From the social network they point out thator comment on security incidents in specific accounts.
“It is normal for people to doubt”
Asked by this newspaper about the possibility that Casillas’ Twitter account had been ‘hacked’, the head of research and awareness of the cybersecurity company ESET, Josep Albors, explains that “it could have been like that, although, indeed, it is normal for people to doubt. Especially, taking into account the short period of time, barely two hours, that passes between the message being published on the athlete’s Twitter and the athlete trying to rectify it.
It should be remembered that, in the summer of 2020, when access to the accounts of users such as Barack Obama or Bill Gates was stolen, a little more than three hours passed since Twitter shared a message confirming the security problem and the social network announced that most of those affected should be able to use their accounts normally again.
“It depends on how the criminals have prepared it. They may have stolen the passwords, published the message, and left the account without changing the access passwords, so Casillas would have continued to use the account without any problem”, says Albors.
It should also be remembered that Twitter has two-step verification system, which allows a user to quickly recover their account if it is correctly configured. The user only has to request a code from the ‘app’ through the password reset form, which is used by the Internet user to request a verification key that arrives via SMS to their phone number or email. Once this is done, you can change the password to access the social network, so automatically logs you out of all sites you’re using it on. In just a few seconds, the Internet user can solve the problem by following this procedure.
The head of ESET research points out that, being a public person, it is likely that, in the event that the ‘hacking’ had occurred, Twitter would have given priority to the case by quickly returning control of the account to the goalkeeper.