Change Your Twitter Password Now!, a bug stored passwords in plain text
The social media platform Twitter has just asked all 300+ million users to reset their old passwords, due to an apparent exposure of user passwords via a bug that stored passwords in plain text — without an ecrypted form of protection that would mask a Twitter user’s true password.
In its company blog yesterday afternoon, Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal wrote:
“When you set a password for your Twitter account, we use technology that masks it so no one at the company can see it. We recently identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We have fixed the bug, and our investigation shows no indication of breach or misuse by anyone.
A message posted this afternoon (and still present as a pop-up) warns all users to change their passwords.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. You can change your Twitter password anytime by going to the password settings page.”
Twitter says it has fixed the bug and that so far its investigation hasn’t turned up any signs of a breach or that anyone misused the information. But if you have a Twitter account, please change your account password now.
