Twitter, the social network that has over half a billion active users, could have just been hit by a huge hack, losing 250,000 of their accounts to a collective group of hackers.
Twitter’s Director of Information Security Bob Lord said that usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted passwords have potentially been lost, but nothing more serious than that.
Thankfully, Twitter encrypts all passwords and the hackers only got a mumble of encryption code, not the password. Nevertheless, Twitter has issued to everyone hacked to change their password and revoked session tokens to all effected.
Another brilliant movement by Twitter was to stop this hack before the hackers gained more data. According to Bob Lord, these weren’t amateurs but a “highly sophisticated team” that has used the same methods quite a few times on the website.
Currently, Twitter is trying to figure out who tried to hack their network and who got away with all the information 250,000 keep on Twitter. They are working with local authorities, but we suspect that since the hacking team is sophisticated and above the average crop, they wouldn’t have left traces of their hack.
This is yet another incident where groups of hackers got passed the barrier to user information, despite Twitter’s best efforts. We must wonder when an online security organisation will step up to fix these poor security issues that many websites suffer from.
Twitter has been very diligent with security, we are glad to see they are not one of these organisations that clearly doesn’t look at security as a major issue. We just hope that the rise of hacking doesn’t overthrow the security measures we have in place on websites.