Twitter has revealed that an internal glitch compromised the account security of its 330 million users. As a precaution, Twitter is suggesting every user change their password.
Early this morning, the official Twitter account sent out this tweet:
We recently found a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We fixed the bug and have no indication of a breach or misuse by anyone. As a precaution, consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. https://t.co/RyEDvQOTaZ
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) May 3, 2018
In the linked blog, the company explained that passwords were stored internally at Twitter without any encryption. That is, anyone with access to the storage location could read user passwords in plain text.
The good news is the bug has been fixed and Twitter does not believe a breach has occurred.
The bad news is, they are still urging users to change the password associated with their Twitter account and, as further precaution, any account where that same password may have been used.
A later tweet by Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal stated that Twitter was “sharing this information to help people make an informed decision about their account security” before suggesting they “didn’t have to” share the update, but “believe it’s the right thing to do”.
Although the suggested course of action is for all users to change their password, Twitter did not provide details on how long the breach occurred for or how many accounts were most at risk.
So, PSA: Your password was stored unencrypted in Twitter’s system and you should probably change it, as soon as possible. Dont pick “Password”.
To change your Twitter password, go into Settings and Privacy and then open Account. From there you can change you password and enable Login Verification which is what Twitter calls 2FA.
You can read Twitter’s take on the issue here.
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