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Image: Venturebeat
BY JASMINE BAILEY
Some 250,000 Twitter accounts worldwide have reportedly been hacked.
In a statement Friday evening, Twitter said it detected unusual access patterns that lead the company to believe hackers were responsible. Twitter says the attackers may have had access to
“usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted versions of passwords”
BBC:
“The passwords themselves haven’t actually been hacked, it’s something called the hash, the encrypted version of the password. But in this day in age that's almost as good… You can use the encrypted version to find out what the actual password is.”
According to CNet, most affected accounts are also among some of the service’s earliest users — created in 2006 or 2007. And it appears the hackers behind the attacks did not target any specific group.
If your account was among those hacked, Twitter has already reset the password and you have already or will shortly receive an email saying so. Twitter urges users to use “good password hygiene.” That includes:
10 or more characters
Mixture of uppercase, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols
Use different passwords for different accounts
This comes after two major U.S. newspapers suffered security breaches earlier this week.
The New York Times claims hackers based in China gained access to email accounts for several staff writers —months after the paper published an unflattering article about the nation’s premier, Wen Jiabao.
And The Wall Street Journal is also blaming the Chinese. Saying they want “to spy on reporters covering China and other issues.”
The Telegraph reports the Chinese government has said those accusations are baseless and that China itself is a victim of cyber-attacks.
The Chinese Defense Ministry said—
“Chinese law forbids hacking and any other actions that damage internet security.”
Twitter has not directly said or even implied the recent hacking had anything to do with China — but it did make mention of the recent newspaper hackings in its blog post. Twitter said it was working with government and federal law enforcement officials to track down the attackers.