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You should probably go ahead and change your Twitter password right now
It’s probably safe to say that you should go ahead and change your Twitter password right now.
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It’s probably safe to say that you should go ahead and change your Twitter password right now.
It’s a scary world out there on the internet thanks to vigilant hackers. Big data breaches are happening more and more, with each one being bigger than the last one. And the next one is set to be huge.
According to LeakedSource, Twitter users are the next target:
“Twitter credentials are being traded in the tens of millions on the dark web. LeakedSource has obtained and added a copy of this data to its ever-growing searchable repository of leaked data,” LeakedSource wrote in a blog post. “This data set was provided to us by a user who goes by the alias ‘Tessa88@exploit.im’, and has given us permission to name them in this blog.”
If you’re not familiar with LeakedSource, they’re a site that collects stolen account data and pools them into a searchable database, giving users the opportunity to see if they been affected in a recent breach.
LeakedSource claims that 32+ million Twitter accounts have been compromised, however, Twitter is confident that they didn’t get hacked.
“We are confident that these usernames and credentials were not obtained by a Twitter data breach – our systems have not been breached. In fact, we’ve been working to help keep accounts protected by checking our data against what’s been shared from recent other password leaks,” a Twitter spokesperson said to TechCrunch.
To help keep people safe and accounts protected, we've been checking our data against what's been shared from recent password leaks.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) June 6, 2016
We securely store all passwords w/ bcrypt. We are working with @leakedsource to obtain this info & take additional steps to protect users.
— Michael Coates (@_mwc) June 9, 2016
More from LeakedSource:
“This data set contains 32,888,300 records. Each record may contain an email address, a username, sometimes a second email and a visible password. We have very strong evidence that Twitter was not hacked, rather the consumer was. These credentials however are real and valid. Out of 15 users we asked, all 15 verified their passwords.”
LeakedSource claims that hackers were able to obtain these all these credentials by utilizing a massive malware campaign, but that’s just speculation at this point.
The main takeaway here is to change your password immediately and enable two-factor authentication.
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