Recently, Twitter is strongly recommending its users to change their passwords after an internal bug was found in the system that exposed their passwords. There is no evidence of any data breach but still, you should change it right away.
Twitter has recommended its users base of 330 million to change their password, because of an internal bug in their system. Twitter has revealed the details of the internal bug in a blog post, as a bug in the hashing process that allowed the passwords of the users to be saved in its internal logs in the plain text form without being encrypted or hashed. Investigations revealed that there are no reports of data leak or misuse of the data. But still, Twitter is warning its users to change their twitters account’s password and any other linked account along with all other services where they have used the same password.
In case if you don’t know about the hashing technique, there are multiple methods to secure your passwords. One of them is hashing, that is a password masking process where the password is replaced with random letters and numbers in order to hide your password. Consider if your password is not masked then it will be saved in a plain text file that can be accessed by anyone who can misuse your password easily.
According to Twitter, this bug was revealed during an internal audit by Twitter itself and ensured that the passwords have not been misused or leaked. An appropriate action has been taken in this regard to prevent data breach that could have result in compromising the security of your accounts. The bug has been fixed successfully but still, it is strongly recommended to change your password if you have not changed it yet. The company further clarified that they are implementing necessary measures required to prevent the bug from happening in future.
Later on, The Chief Executive tweeted confirming the news, “We recently discovered a bug where account passwords were being written to an internal log before completing a masking/hashing process. We have fixed, see no indication of breach or misuse, and believe its important for us to be open about this internal defect”
You might be interested in knowing, for how the bug existed in the system and how many users were affected by this bug. These details have not been shared by the company yet but you might be shocked to know that “the data was exposed for several months and substantial numbers of passwords have been affected during that duration”, stated Reuters.
You might have noticed a warning message when you log in to your account. You can simply navigate to the settings page to change your password.
Editor’s Recommendations
Well, it is highly appreciated the way Twitter handled the issue internally and informed its users as soon as the company came to know about it. That act shows that they value their user’s trust more than anything else. But in order to save your accounts from being hacked in case of such bugs or data breaches, you should consider changing your passwords regularly.
It is also highly recommended by security experts to use different passwords for different accounts as most of us have a habit of using the same password that is easy to remember. You should use password manager apps that allow you to generate unique passwords for all of your accounts. You just have to remember and enter one password and that will unlock all of your passwords for each account managed and saved by the app. Moreover expert often recommends using two-factor authentication process that will make it impossible for others to hack your account in future.
Source: Twitter Blog
