Approximately 250,000 Twitter account passwords have been compromised by hackers, Twitter said in a blog today, noting that the company now is among the “recent uptick in large-scale security attacks aimed at U.S. technology and media companies,” including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Twitter has already taken action on the compromised accounts, requiring a password reset before any hacked handle can be accessed again. All infiltrated accounts have also received email alerts, so check your inbox just to be safe.
If this all sounds familiar, we've been through a similar drill before. On Nov. 8, 2012, Twitter mistakenly asked a “large number of accounts” to reset their passwords after they found a small group of accounts to at risk of being compromised.
While the number of affected Twitter handles account for less than 0.125 percent of the service’s 200 million active tweeters, the number represents Twitter’s largest data compromise to date. Even so, the attack pales in comparison to LinkedIn’s security breach in June of last year, where 6.4 million passwords were stolen.
Twitter is taking this opportunity to remind the other 99.9 percent of its users to ensure that their passwords are strong, with “at least 10 (but more is better) characters and a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols – that you are not using for any other accounts or sites.”
It also recommends using different passwords for every site you frequent, a Twitter password should be different than, say, your Gmail or Facebook password.
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