Twitter says hackers may have stolen 250,000 user accounts in a cyber-attack
Twitter, via its blog announced that its online social networking was attacked by hackers recently and the attackers may have had access to approximately 250,000 users’ information such as usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords.
Twitter has reset passwords and revoked session tokens for affected accounts. The victims of this cyber-attack will be notified by Twitter via email about the need to create a new password. Twitter also urged other users to follow good password hygiene and use a strong password – at least 10 (but more is better) characters and a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. The users are advised not using the same password for multiple online account which will significantly increases the chances of the Internet accounts being compromised.
Twitter believed this incident was not an isolated cyber-attack after saw New York Times and Wall Street Journal have chronicled breaches of their systems within the last two weeks. Twitter now is working closely with US government and federal law enforcement to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.
by Terry Brown
