A candidate running for the upcoming Assembly election has issued a warning to everyone to make sure that their social media accounts are secure, after his own was hacked.

Alliance candidate Matthew Beaumont discovered on Tuesday morning that his Twitter profile had been compromised through a third-party application that was logged into his Twitter account

Mr. Beaumont does not know if this was a random or targeted attack as of yet, but is looking into it further. Thankfully, he was able to fix the problem before it got out of hand.

“Somehow, my Twitter account was accessed without my consent, and a mixture of vulgar and downright odd tweets were written and saved to come out over the course of today; a number of ridiculous [direct messages] were sent to people,” he explained.

“Instead of just dumping a load of crude stuff and just running away, [the hacker] set it to go off through the course of the day, so you wouldn’t necessarily know [you were hacked].

“Some of the content that was going to come out was vulgar. Basically, what happened is, it was a third-party app that I had logged into the Twitter account; the password was the same for that third-party app as the Twitter account, and the third-party app was compromised.”

Once he was notified of the suspicious activity on his account, Mr. Beaumont spent an hour and a half trying to find out what happened, as well as deleting the hacker’s published and unpublished Tweets on his account.

He is now encouraging people to check their online safety is strong using such practices as two-step authentication, and strong passwords, as well as checking what applications may have access to their social media accounts.

He said: “Take steps to protect yourself. It could have been a hell of a lot more embarrassing.

“Had [the hacker’s tweets] been released, I would have been having to explain an awful lot.

“The content was unacceptable for a Twitter account anyway, but particularly a Twitter account that is having to hold itself up to a higher standard.

“But there are so many more important things happening in the world, that I wanted to fix this small issue, and move on to things that matter more,” Mr. Beaumont concluded.