Do you know why 250000 twitter accounts were hacked ?
Around 250000 Twitter users may have had their accounts compromised by computer hackers.
The social networking site said usernames, email addresses and encrypted
passwords may have been taken during an “extremely sophisticated”
attack on its systems.
It said one attack was shut down moments after it was detected adding
that the passwords of users who may have been affected had been reset.
In a blog posting, Bob Lord director of information security at Twitter,
said there had been “a recent uptick in large scale security attacks
aimed at US technology and media companies” with the New York Times
among those targeted.
He said “Our investigation has indicated the attackers may have had
access to limited user information usernames, email addresses session
tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords for approximately
250000 users.”
“As a precautionary security measure we have reset passwords and revoked
session tokens for these accounts. This attack was not the work of
amateurs and we do not believe it was an isolated incident”, he added.
“The attackers were extremely sophisticated and we believe other
companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.”
One expert said the hackers may have gained access through an employees
home or work computer by exploiting vulnerabilities in Java a widely
used computing language.
Ashkan Soltani an independent privacy and security researcher said such a
move would give attackers “a toehold” in Twitters internal network
potentially allowing them to track user information as it travelled
across the companys systems or break into specific areas such as the
authentication servers that process users passwords.
Although the hackers are unlikely to have gained any confidential
information Mr Soltani said the stolen credentials could be used to
access other services for which a person has signed up using the same
username and password.
Mr Lord said that although “only a very small percentage” of users were
potentially affected everyone who uses the site should ensure their
password is secure.
He said passwords should be at least 10 characters long contain upper
and lowercase letters numbers and symbols and be different to passwords
used for other online accounts.
Twitter Has been HACKED.TechnologyIQ Note Twitter Hacked Change Password
Dont PanicTwitter Hacked Up To 250000 Passwords Taken 2nd Feb
2013Twitter hacked could affect 250000 user accounts
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About 2 Lakh Facebook accounts were hacked on 15-NOV-12, 250000 Twitter accounts were hacked on 1-FEB-13 at the same time New York Times was hacked.
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