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03 February 2010
Posted in
Social Media
Twitter asked several of it's users to reset their passwords recently, as a security measure. Smells a little fishy if you ask me. Now the twitter team have announced that there has been a security compromise, a very intricate one at that.
Twitter officials have released a statement that gives us some background information too. This is their official statement of what happened:
“It appears that for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up. Additional exploits to gain admin root on forums that weren’t created by this person also appear to have been utilized; in some instances, the exploit involved redirecting attempts to access the forums to another site that would request log-in information. This information was then used to attempt to gain access to third party sites like Twitter. We haven’t identified all of the forums involved (nor is it likely that we’ll be able to, since we don’t have any connection with them), but as a general rule, if you’ve signed up for a torrent forum or torrent site built by a third party, you should probably change your password there.”
This is yet another pointer to the advice all sites give when choosing a password, do not use the same passwords on different sites! It's repeated every time you signup to anything, so just be a little smarter and don’t use important site passwords like paypal for any other account, or you may lose track of a lot more than your twitter account.
