Hootsuite, the service that allows companies to manage their different social media accounts, is announcing on Thursday new tools intended to help large companies better prepare for hacks on Twitter.
The new features from Hootsuite are meant for the company’s enterprise clients, which can take advantage of three different options: a “social media asset audit,” which tries to prevent weaknesses around shared passwords; alerts when suspicious activity happens on an account; and crisis management training to help people understand what to do in case of an emergency.
The package of products seems like an extremely smart idea from Hootsuite, especially considering recent hacks xxxxx and yyyy, and they’ll be launching for the company’s enterprise clients immediately. But it does beg the question why Twitter itself doesn’t offer any of these services. The company finally rolled out two-factor authentication to users this month, which we wrote before was a much-needed feature. But the variety of services Hootsuite will be offering show just how much more Twitter could do.
We’ve now seen strong indication that a hacked Twitter account can cause both incredible personal damage to individual users whose accounts are compromised, and have financial and security fallout when larger organizations like the AP are hacked. With tweets feeding into Bloomberg terminals and affecting the stock market, it’s clear that there is real value to made in breaching accounts.
Twitter itself acknowledges that it’s been slow to add these kinds of security features — at the D11 conference on Wednesday CEO Dick Costolo said, “we haven’t moved as quickly there as we wanted to.” But perhaps savvy moves from companies like Hootsuite will give Twitter just the push it needs.
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