Have you been seeing any weird Twitter messages lately? Like spammy advertisements for green tea pills or Russian-made anything? If so, that person might have been the victim of a Twitter hack, and that wouldn’t be the only compromised account. This morning/late last night, Twitter did password resets for 250,000 accounts that may have been compromised by a hacker attack. Among the stolen data were usernames, encrypted passwords, email addresses, and other information. And rather than attacking users, they attacked Twitter itself.
“This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked. For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users,” said Bob Lord, Twitter’s information security director, in a blog post.
Pretty scary, huh? I’ve already reset my Twitter password, and I recommend you do the same if you got an email from Twitter or not. Better to be safe than sorry.
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