Twitter has announced that its systems had been attacked in the past week by a bunch of unidentified ne’er do wells who had potentially gained access to the usernames, email addresses and other sensitive information of nearly a quarter of a million twitter users.
Posting on their blog, the company said:
This week, we detected unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process moments later. However, 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.
As a precautionary security measure, we have reset passwords and revoked session tokens for these accounts. If your account was one of them, you will have recently received (or will shortly) an email from us at the address associated with your Twitter account notifying you that you will need to create a new password. Your old password will not work when you try to log in to Twitter.
We found ourselves among the ones who received emails requiring us to reset our password – which we promptly did – but be sure to check the provenance of any emails you receive claiming to be from Twitter.
Read more about the possible hacking here.
