Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter account was hacked, but unfortunately the hackers weren’t fifteen year old high school students who wanted to complain about wasting two hours of their lives watching Killers. They weren’t porn moguls who wanted to promote their little-known Butterfly Effect sex parody for free. (I could go on.) It was part of a tech conference that Ashton was taking part in, in which people supposedly gained access to his account and used it to bring awareness to the need for SSL (secure socket layer) be turned on by default in Twitter. Without SSL, it’s easy for hackers to gain access to users’ passwords when they’re on an unsecured/open wireless connection. (Or even if the wireless has a password that they know as well.) Ashton hasn’t updated his Twitter account after the breach occurred, so I’m thinking he might have co-signed it (or staged it) for publicity purposes. Here’s more:

Ashton Kutcher, whom most people will know for his TV work on That 70s Show, and his own produced show called Punk’d, seems to have got a taste of his own medicine recently when at this years TED conference his Twitter account, with more than 6 million followers, got hacked.

Not much of a big deal you may think, but the TED venue is a world-famous conference that consists of some of the top elite spokes people (i.e. Bill Gates) and the hacker was using this event to make a point over the security of Twitter and Facebook.

Out of the two messages that the hacker posted on the Twitter site, the first seemed to be harmless enough as it reads:

Ashton, you’ve been Punk’d,” “This account is not secure. Dude, where’s my SSL?

The second message was more political but they both point to the same thing: a lack of security:

P.S. This is for those young protesters around the world who deserve not to have their Facebook & Twitter accounts hacked like this. #SSL

The SSL parts stands for Secure Sockets Layer and you will mostly see this on websites in the form of https or a small padlock symbol down in the lower right hand corner of your browser. Without it any data that is transmitted on the page will be insecure and vulnerable to hacks. But it’s this feature that so many Twitter and Facebook fans have long cried out for to help secure their accounts.

So the hacker’s successful entries into Kutcher’s account was more to prove a point than to be malicious, but it does highlight how insecure Twitter is. Even though Twitter does have SSL it’s not switched to by default. However, Twitter is looking at building this into future releases as a user setting, but for those who want to use it now, instead of typing in “http://www.twitter.com/nameofyourtwiitteraccount” you would replace the http part with https and that’s it.

[From Geek.com via Wonderwall]

You can make sure that SSL is turned on by checking for https in the address line of your browser, as described in the quote above. If you’re on an open wireless you can also use a free service to protect your computer, like Hotspot Shield or another proxy (many are free) or VPN. (FYI – both Hotmail and Gmail have SSL turned on by default. I think Yahoo! does too at least for the login process.)

As for Ashton Kutcher, he acts like he’s this big tech guy but he didn’t turn SSL on for Twitter. To be fair, there’s no setting for it that I can find and you just have to add an “s” to http: in order to access it. I hope the hackers changed Ashton’s password and contact information and make him wait a while to get access to his Twitter account. He’ll have to find another way to supplement whatever income he makes for going to events.

Photos are from 2/10/11 credit: WENN.com