Have you changed your Twitter account Password recently? After reading this article you probably should. Over the past few days, over 58,978 usernames and passwords was posted on the website Pastebin.
In most “ethical hacks”, only a snippet of the compromised information is posted online as a warning or to embarrass the service provider. What’s unfortunate about this Twitter security event is that all of the information was posted online. Five posts worth of information (mainly because it has a storage limit per file of 512 Kb) was made available on May 7th for the world to access. In case you’re curious, the first post is here. The rest also have a very worthy place in the Pastebin trends page at the moment.
Be that as it may, Twitter says you have no reason to worry. A spokesperson for the company spoke with The Inquirer and, well, the summary is those accounts were spammy ones. In other words, over 20,000 of the account are and primarily used created by bots to SPAM valid Twitter users and most of them were “already gone before this happened”.
Whatever the case, now is probably a good idea to spend a little time on account maintenance and come up with a strong password and secure your Twitter account as well as any other online account you might have.
This just proves that there really is no security at all
with social media services. Unless you want everything
you say (via Twitter for example) or post (as in Facebook
for example) stolen and exposed for all the world to see and
do what they will with (employers asking for your Facebook
id and password, REALLY?), steer clear until the sites
truly demonstrate they can keep information secure and if
they can’t are smacked with ginormous fines and other punishments.