Do you have a Twitter account? If so you need to change your password if you haven’t already done so. You need to do it now so take a second and if you don’t know how click on this link which will take you to the Twitter page to do so.
Twitter recently discovered that a bug has caused passwords to be stored in a plain text file. The bug has been fixed but those passwords were stored for a time unencrypted and exposed. The system was designed to store a password in an internal log in a way that no one at the company could see it for security reasons. It is a state of the art system known as bcrypt and stores the password as a random set of numbers and letters so that no one would be able to steal passwords from that log and use them. The bug was causing the passwords to be written to a plain text file and storing them before the password was encrypted and masked, exposing them to whoever had access to the file.
At the moment there do not appear to be any malicious uses of the data and Twitter is confident that the information never left the company. In the wake of recent data breaches and other incidents like this it is refreshing to see that at least one company is not trying to cover this up and praying nothing bad comes out of it. Twitter is at least doing everything they can to make their users aware and to fix the problem. Perhaps it is finally getting through that the cover-up is far worse and far more expensive than the crime.
For anyone who has a Twitter account this is a good time to update you or your businesses Twitter password. Using a strong password is always a good idea and if you have not been using one now is as good of a time as any to fix that. While you’re at it why not update your other weak passwords as well? It makes you and your business more secure and that is a good thing.