Twitter urged all of its 330 million+ users to immediately change their passwords after a bug caused the platform to store user passwords in unmasked form (or say in plain text). Twitter’s investigation showed that there was no evidence of any breach or misuse, but the company is recommending users to change their Twitter password.
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Change Your Twitter Password Right Now
Normally, the sensitive data like passwords would be stored in the hashed form using a mix of letters and numbers to protect the content of the password itself. “Out of an abundance of caution”, Twitter is advising its users to change their Twitter password both on the site and anywhere else they may have used that password, which also includes third-party apps like Fenix, TweetDeck, and Flamingo.
We recently found a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We fixed the bug and have no indication of a breach or misuse by anyone. As a precaution, consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. https://t.co/RyEDvQOTaZ
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) May 3, 2018
According to Twitter, the bug occurred due to an issue in the hashing process that masks passwords by replacing them with a random string of characters that get stored on Twitter’s systems. But due to an error with the system, apparently, passwords were being saved in plain text to an internal log, instead of masking them with the hashing process.
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Do consider, two-factor authentication and a password manager like LastPass or 1Password to keep your account credentials safe even when the platforms you use fail to do so.
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