250,000 Twitter Accounts Hacked

Posted on Feb 2, 2013

trekkyandy (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Anonymous hackers gained access to the usernames, email addresses and passwords associated with a quarter of a million Twitter accounts before the company noticed “unusual access patterns” across its network Friday, The Guardian reports.

Bob Lord, director of information security at Twitter, said the attack was “not the work of amateurs” and probably not an isolated incident.

“Our investigation has thus far indicated that the attackers may have had access to limited user information—usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords—for approximately 250,000 users,” Lord said. “As a precautionary security measure, we have reset passwords and revoked session tokens for these accounts.

“The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.”

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

The Guardian:

The attack on Twitter is the latest in a string of high-profile security breaches on US technology and media companies. Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have had their sites hacked in the last two weeks and Apple and Mozilla have turned off Java by default in their browsers to minimise the risk.

Twitter users who have had their accounts breached will have to reset their passwords before they will have access to the site.

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