Change Your Password Now! , says Twitter to all users

Change Your Password Now! , says Twitter to all users

Twitter just asked all 300+ million users to reset their passwords, citing the exposure of user passwords via a bug that stored passwords in plain text — without protecting them with any sort of encryption technology that would mask a Twitter user’s true password.

The social media giant 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.

Or if you don’t trust links in blogs like this (I get it) go to Twitter.com and change it from there. And then come back and read the rest of this. We’ll wait.

In a post to its company blog this 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.

“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.”

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Agrawal explains that Twitter normally masks user passwords through a state-of-the-art encryption technology called “bcrypt,” which replaces the user’s password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter’s system.

“This allows our systems to validate your account credentials without revealing your password,” said Agrawal, who says the technology they’re using to mask user passwords is the industry standard.

“Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process,” he continued. “We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.”

Agrawal wrote that while Twitter has no reason to believe password information ever left Twitter’s systems or was misused by anyone, the company is still urging all Twitter users to reset their passwords NOW.