Your Twitter password was probably exposed
It's time to think up another nonsensical combination of capital letters, special symbols, and random numbers.
Twitter announced in a blog post Thursday that a glitch had caused users' passwords to be revealed in plain text in its internal systems. The bug has been fixed, Twitter said, but "out of an abundance of caution" it is recommending that users consider changing their account passwords. "Our investigation shows no indication of breach or misuse by anyone," the company added.
The social network explained that user passwords are obscured from internal view using a tool known as bcrypt, which replaces passwords with random arrangements of numbers and letters. A glitch resulted in the passwords being written in their actual state in an internal log.
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"We found this error ourselves," Twitter clarified, and the service has already removed all passwords from its internal logs. Twitter has more than 330 million users worldwide. Read the company's full announcement here.
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Kimberly Alters is the news editor at TheWeek.com. She is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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