May 3, 2018, 4:21pm EDT
There’s apparently no evidence of any breach or misuse, but you should change your password anyway
Twitter is urging all of its more than 330 million users to immediately change their passwords after a bug exposed them in plain text. While Twitter’s investigation showed that there was no evidence that any breach or misuse of the unmasked passwords occurred, the company is recommending that users change their Twitter passwords out of an “abundance of caution,” both on the site itself and anywhere else they may have used that password, which includes third-party apps like Twitterrific and TweetDeck.
According to Twitter, the bug occurred due to an issue in the hashing process that masks passwords by replacing them with a random string of characters that get stored on Twitter’s system. But due to an error with the system, apparently passwords were being saved in plain text to an internal log, instead of masking them with the hashing process. Twitter claims to have found the bug on its own and removed the passwords. It’s working to make sure that similar issues don’t come up again.
