How to Secure Your Twitter Account Without a Blue Subscription

When Twitter announced on Feb. 17 that it will start charging people to use text-based account verification, a basic technique that all kinds of sites rely on to protect their users, the cybersecurity community reacted with a collective groan.

With this type of two-factor authentication, users enter their username and password into Twitter and then receive a message to their phone with a unique code that they type in for access to the site. It’s not a perfect security mechanism, but it’s a convenient and mostly effective way of keeping hackers out of accounts. After all, a wannabe ...