Major Bug Prompted Twitter Users To Change Passwords For Security Purposes
Twitter has since urged its more than 330 million users to immediately change their passwords after a bug exposed them in plain text.
According to reports, an investigation revealed there was no evidence of a breach or misuse of the unmasked passwords. However, as a precautionary measure, the company has urged all Twitter users to change their Twitter passwords. The users must do it on the site itself and anywhere else they may have used their passwords. This includes third-party applications like Twitterific and TweetDeck.
Twitter said the bug occurred following an issue in the hashing process that masks passwords. It allegedly replaced them with a random string of characters that are within Twitter’s system. Due to an error, the passwords allegedly were saved in plain text and to an internal log, instead of being hidden with the hashing process. Twitter has since claimed to have found the bug and removed the passwords. The network also made sure similar issues don’t recur.
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However, Twitter has not revealed how many passwords may have potentially been compromised. Also, the question of how long the bug was exposing the passwords remains to be a mystery. The fact that the company is urging its entire user base to change their passwords indicates that it would seem to be a significant number of users. Due to this, social media operations within the network have significantly decreased. Obviously, this slowdown has affected celebrities and businesses who are promoting and marketing on Twitter.
Following such an incident, do consider switching over to a password manager and avoid repeating passwords across services. That way, when leaks like these do happen, you can avoid the worst of the damage.
