Twitter has advised that the more than 330 million users on its platform should change their passwords due to a bug.
Apparently the bug led to passwords being saved in plain texts on their logs. “We recently identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log,” Twitter said.
Twitter has also assured its users that they have fixed the bug and they found out that there is “no indication of breach or misuse by anyone.”
Twitter uses the industry standard of encrypting passwords known as hashing where the password is replaced with a set of numbers and letters and these are stored on Twitter. Thanks to this bug, these passwords were written into internal logs before completing the hashing process, hence causing a massive privacy nightmare.
This has also led Twitter to advice its users to change their passwords on twitter. You can do this by going to Settings > Password on web or Settings > Account > Change password on mobile. Choose a strong password that you don’t use in other websites and even enable two factor authentication to further secure the account.
“We are very sorry this happened. We recognize and appreciate the trust you place in us, and are committed to earning that trust every day,” Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CTO said. It is great that Twitter decided to come upfront with this information and it would be wise to change your Twitter account’s password right now.
We have seen a lot of password leaks over the time and you can see them on this database, although we are lucky that using them could be a thing of the past.
