With Facebook and Google + taking over the social networking market, Twitter has a hard fight to win. The only thing that’s left is to ensure its users data is safe from illicit use. A recent data leak shows the opposite. Thousands of Twitter passwords were exposed in data dump.
Not many people start their week on Pastebin, unless they’re hackers showing off their latest projects. In fact for most of you Pastebin is likely unknown. But if you were looking this Monday on Pastebin, chances are you’ve noticed some pastes named Twitter Account v1 to v5. It is likely curiosity pushed you to open the pastes and, surprise surprise, the data in the pastes were in fact Twitter accounts exposed.
PC World writes that “58,978 login and password combinations were published Monday to Pastebin”. But, as Twitter claims, the exposed Twitter passwords were duplicates, spam accounts and in a few words, no actual user had to suffer from the data leak.
“We have confirmed that no one’s information has been leaked from Twitter” reads a Twitter blog. Spokeswoman Rachel Bremer released a statement via email reading that the exposed Twitter logins and passwords are worth…nothing. “So far, we’ve discovered that the list of alleged accounts and passwords found on Pastebin consists of more than 20,000 duplicates, many spam accounts that have already been suspended” said Rachel Bremer.
The social network announced that it has already contacted the affected users and suggested that everyone who suspects their account may have been compromised to reset the passwords. “We have pushed out password resets to accounts that may have been affected” said Bremer, adding that the Twitter Help Center provides additional information on how to protect accounts against data leaks.
Air Demon is a hactivist news source that said the Twitter password leak is just a warning. “This hack is just an alert to other millions of Twitter users that they could be hacked anytime”. For Twitter’s 140 million users that’s a huge threat.
Obviously now everybody’s wondering who’s behind the data leak. PC Mag writes that in April, Twitter clashed with marketing firms which it accused of launching spam campaigns.
