A new day, and a new security problem, this time: Twitter today alerted its 330 million users to change their passwords after it detected a flaw in one of its internal logs that stored their passwords “unmasked.”
Twitter since has fixed the bug and said it has no knowledge of a breach or abuse of the information but is asking users to create new passwords just in case.
The company protects users’ passwords via the bcrypt hasing function, which basically replaces the password with a mix of random letters and numbers that are then stored in Twitter’s servers.
“Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process. We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again,” Twitter said in a blog post about the exposed passwords.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password,” the company said.
Quick recommendation: change your Twitter password.
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Pedro Tavares is a professional in the field of information security working as an Ethical Hacker/Pentester, Malware Researcher and also a Security Evangelist. He is also a founding member at CSIRT.UBI and Editor-in-Chief of the security computer blog seguranca-informatica.pt.
In recent years he has invested in the field of information security, exploring and analyzing a wide range of topics, such as pentesting (Kali Linux), malware, exploitation, hacking, IoT and security in Active Directory networks. He is also Freelance Writer (Infosec. Resources Institute and Cyber Defense Magazine) and developer of the 0xSI_f33d – a feed that compiles phishing and malware campaigns targeting Portuguese citizens.
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