Twitter advises all users to change their passwords

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO

Twitter on Thursday advised all 330 million of its users to change their passwords because a computer glitch potentially exposed the passwords.

The company said a computer bug unmasked passwords of Twitter users on the company’s system. Although an internal investigation found no evidence that hackers have exploited the glitch, Twitter is advising all users to immediately change their passwords.

The company did not reveal exactly how many users were impacted.

“We recently found a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log,” Twitter’s official customer support account posted Thursday afternoon. “We fixed the bug and have no indication of a breach or misuse by anyone. As a precaution, consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password.”

The issue apparently stemmed from how the company hides user passwords on systems at Twitter by replacing the passwords with random strings of letters and symbols. The company said that it found one part of the system that saved the unmasked passwords.

“We recently discovered a bug where account passwords were being written to an internal log before completing a masking/hashing process,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in a statement. “We’ve fixed, see no indication of breach or misuse, and believe it’s important for us to be open about this internal defect.”

Even though this glitch exposed potentially all of Twitter’s whole user base, it is still smaller than several other recent data breaches. In October last year, Yahoo revealed that the passwords for 3 billion users were hacked four years prior.

Shares of Twitter dropped about 1 percent in after-hours trading, dipping to $30.34 late Thursday afternoon.