Twitter: Hackers steal 250,000 account passwords

Saturday, 2 February 2013

Twitter: Hackers steal 250,000 account passwords

by Mike Anderson

Popular social networking site Twitter has become the latest hacking victim

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- The Twitter accounts of at least 250,000 users have been hacked, the social networking site confirmed late on Friday. Along with usernames and passwords, email addresses and other data have been stolen by hackers, the social media giant said.

Twitter's information security director Bob Lord described the attack as "not the work of amateurs". It is the latest in a string of high-profile cyber attacks on media companies.

"This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident," Lord wrote in a blog post, alluding to similar attacks on the websites of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

"The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organisations have also been recently similarly attacked," he said.

The social media company, which has as many as 200 million users, did not disclose any details on how the accounts were hacked and by whom. However, the company's blog post did hint that the security breach may be related to a recently discovered vulnerability in Oracle's Java software. As we reported last month, U.S. authorities had issued a warning to users, urging them to disable Java on their computers.

According to Twitter, the passwords for hacked accounts had been reset and emails sent out to all affected users with detailed instructions on how to create a new password.

The social networking giant advised users to choose strong passwords of at least 10 (but more is better) characters and a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.