After a recent leak of allegedly over 32 million passwords, Twitter has been forced to respond by locking many users out of their accounts.
The leak, which became public late Wednesday night, saw a website called LeakedSource announce it was in possession of 33 million passwords and Twitter account credentials. While Twitter has not corroborated these numbers, it did admit that the users affected were in the millions.
Twitter has denied any responsibility for the hacks and the company"s Trust and Security Officer, Michael Coates, is adamant that the company"s servers were not breached - indeed, the formatting of the data has led even LeakedSource to back Coates, stating that it was pretty confident that "Twitter wasn’t hacked, rather the consumer was."
Coates also added that the number of users affected, while clearly in the millions, may not have been as large as stated by LeakedSource as a number of the accounts "were not valid".
In response, however, the social platform has been forced to work with LeakedSource to identify at-risk accounts and has issued warnings to the affected users, even locking many out of their accounts pending a password reset.
This should serve as just another reminder of the need for measures such as two-factor authentication and the need to change your passwords regularly.
Source: The Wall Street Journal (requires subscription)