If you have a Twitter account and haven’t signed in today yet, you probably should do that now and change your password while you’re at it. A bug exposed the passwords of an unspecified number of Twitter users. While the social network won’t say how many were affected, they are urging all 330 million useres to change passwords. You will get a pop-up notification the first time you sign in today to do so. It’ll also then encourage you to check out which accounts are linked to your Twitter profile and let you revoke access to those you no longer use or want to have access to.
Twitter assures its users that it hasn’t seen any evidence of a breach or misuse of the passwords but they want you to change out of an “abundance of caution.” The bug caused problems in the hashing process that masks passwords and changes these with random strings of characters before these are stored in Twitter’s systems. The passwords were saved in plain text in the internal log. Twitter says it found the bug on its own and are making sure this problem or anything similar to it won’t happen again.
The social network has offered a list of things to do now to make sure you secure your account:
- Change your password on Twitter and on any other service where you may have used the same password.
- Use a strong password that you don’t reuse on other websites.
- Enable login verification, also known as two factor authentication. This is the single best action you can take to increase your account security.
- Use a password manager to make sure you’re using strong, unique passwords everywhere.
