Currently, Twitter has over 330 million users, and the social media giant is asking each one of them to change their Twitter account password.
Advertisement
Twitter has found a bug that stored unmasked user passwords in an internal log.
London:Twitter has urged all of its more than 330m users to change their account passwords, after discovering a bug that the company says saved users’ passwords without proper encryption. “We are very sorry this happened”.
“We recently found a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log”.
Some people may want to go the whole hog and just delete the app altogether – not worth the faff if you only use it to watch other people arguing anyway.
It meant some passwords were stored in plain text on its internal computer system. In a nod to normal human behaviour, Twitter also reminded users that if they use the same password on Twitter anywhere else, they should change that too (and use individual passwords on every site or service). Although it has probably not been abused, the company advises all its users to change their password.
Twitter shares ebbed about a percent to $30.36 in after-market trades that followed word of the password mishap.
Twitter discovered the bug a few weeks ago and has reported it to some regulators, said the person, who was not authorized to discuss the matter.
Since then, it has fixed the issue and is no longer storing the passwords in clear text.
Our suggestion is to take action if you don’t want your Twitter account to be compromised. There’s an option at the bottom of the password page that’ll let you reset it.
“I will be working to continue our longstanding commitment to protecting you and upholding your right to privacy”, Twitter’s Data Protection Officer Demien Keiran had said in a blog.
The advantage of such a process is that Twitter is able to authenticate your details without really revealing any of it.
Advertisement
Agrawal said that it has a system in place to make sure no employees can access or misuse users’ passwords.
