Twitter Advised Its Users To Change Their Passwords After Security Blunder

Yesterday, Twitter.com advised all of its users to change their passwords after a huge security blunder exposed users' passwords online in an unprotected format. The social networking service released a statement on May 3rd:

"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."

Security experts advise consumers not to use the same password at several sites or services. Repeated use of the same password makes it easy for criminals to hack into multiple sites or services.

The statement by Twitter.com also explained that it masks users' passwords:

"... through a process called hashing using a function known as bcrypt, which replaces the actual 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. This is an industry standard.

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

The good news: Twitter found the buy by itself. The not-so-good news: the statement was short on details. It did not disclose details about the fixes so this blunder doesn't happen again. Nor did the statement say how many users were affected. Twitter has about 330 million users, so it seems that all users were affected.