You probably know by now that Twitter killed off Vine, their famous video sharing platform that allowed people to share 6 second videos that were incredibly creative and contributed greatly to Internet culture. They went ahead to say that they will keep the precious archive and as consolation, they would convert the app into a normal camera app that they named Vine Camera.
However according to Twitter, Vine had a serious bug that affected the former network’s archive which might have exposed the email addresses and phone numbers for an unknown number of Vine users.
“While we have no information indicating that any user information impacted by this incident has been misused, it’s always a good idea to be cautious of emails or text messages received from unknown senders,” Twitter said in the Medium post.
Users that were affected were apparently notified if they had a verified email address on file and Twitter says that if you weren’t notified, you most likely weren’t affected.
Fortunately, Twitter says that they were able to fix the bug quickly which is great to prevent further damage. However, for those people that were affected and got the message from Twitter need to secure their accounts quickly for fear of the email addresses and phone numbers being used to hack other accounts, which is a real possibility.
User data like emails and phone numbers are valuable to hackers and that is why social networks with such data like Twitter employ highly skilled people to secure such data. We have seen reports of passwords belonging to Twitter users leaking on the web and people using dumb passwords to secure their accounts, so be weary.
