Twitter advises its 336 million users to change their passwords

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Twitter advises its 336 million users to change their passwords

4:54 CAT | 04 May 2018

Twitter Twitter has urged its 336 million users to immediately change their passwords. (Net photo)

Social networking site, Twitter has urged its 336 million users to immediately change their passwords after the company discovered a bug that stored passwords in plain text in an internal system.

However, the company said it had fixed the problem and had seen “no indication of breach or misuse”, but it recommended users consider changing their password on Twitter and on all services where they have used the same password “as a precaution”.

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 a blogpost by Twitter’s chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal apologised for the mishap and urged users to change their passwords.

“We are very sorry this happened “We recognise and appreciate the trust you place in us, and are committed to earning that trust every day.”

“Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process. We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.”

Agrawal advises people to change their passwords, enable two-factor authentication on their Twitter account and use a password manager to create strong, unique passwords on every service they use.

Companies with good security practices typically store user passwords in a form that cannot be read. In Twitter’s case, passwords are masked through a process called hashing, which replaces the actual password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in the company’s system.

By Bryan Kimenyi

Source: The New Times Rwanda