After Facebook, You Need To Change Your Twitter Password Right Now!

Twitter breach
source: Twitter logo

Well, here we go again! After Facebook and Careem, it’s time for you to change the password of your Twitter account.

We were promised flying cars in 2018 and what did we get? Data breaching!

A bug caused the platform to store user passwords in unmasked form- says Twitter:

Well before crying out loud, here’s are the important aspects of this latest news.

If you didn’t know it before then here’s a little piece of information, sensitive personal data like passwords would be stored in the hashed form using a mix of letters and numbers to protect the content of the password.

But with Twitter’s confession, it looks like the social media platform stored plain text passwords openly without any hashing on an internal log.

Here’s what Twitter has to say for the breaching:

Like any other social media giant, Twitter Support has published their side of the story for its users.

At the initial stage, we know that this isn’t a breaching of personal information like  Facebook faced. And unlike Careem, the social media giant didn’t get hacked.

Here’s what happened according to Twitter:

We mask 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.

In simple words, in order to secure your passwords, you need to change it right now. One should not take any risk amid breaching scandals and hacking scenarios.

By Maira Feroz

A journalism student who's studying the native form of journalism but is performing it in the digital way.