Tweet, tweet! No, that’s not a bird you’re hearing outside your window, that’s Twitter kindly reminding you to change your password immediately. And that goes for every single user, as it was discovered just today, on World Password Day no less, that all 330 million Twitter users need to change their passwords to their accounts after a bug exposed them in plain text.
So, how did this exactly happen? According to Twitter, this vulnerability came about due to an issue within the hashing process that masks passwords. This process is supposed to mask these passwords by replacing them with a random string of characters that get stored on Twitter’s system. However, an error occurred during this process that caused these passwords to be saved in plain text to an internal log.
This news first came to light via a company blog, as Twitter confirmed that “we found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.” So far, Twitter has not revealed how many users’ passwords may have been potentially compromised or how long the bug was exposing passwords before the issue was discovered – which is precisely why the company has advised every user to change their password just in case.
