Over 55,000 Twitter passwords leak

Twitter said to be investigating the alleged leak of over 55,000 passwords and e-mail addresses from users. The accounts were exposed on Pastebin.com, a site operated by software engineer Prabakaran Santhanam. There's no reason why the accounts were posted.

Robert Weeks, a spokesperson for Twitter, said to the press Twitter is automatically pushing password resets to account that were affected, and he added: "Those who are concerned that their account may have been compromised, we suggest resetting your passwords and more in our Help Center."

According to Twitter, nearly 20,000 of these accounts were duplicates or spam accounts, which had all been deleted. Among the others, the company states that the weakness of passwords were one of the main issues; over 1,000 of the leaked accounts, for example, used "123456" as password.

Comments