Twitter Hacked: 250,000 User Accounts Effected

Twitter announced on Friday evening that its systems had been hacked in the past week by an unidentified group resulting in unauthorized access to the usernames, and email addresses, as well as other sensitive information from 250,000 Twitter users.

According to All Things D, the Twitter hack occurred after a week of major, nationally publicized security issues with a number of major publications, including The New York Times. Two of the publications made allegations that the attacks were a result of reports on Chinese officials, and that the Chinese government may be involved in some capacity.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, China was accused of the hack on The New York Times, to which the Chinese government became outraged.

In Director of Security Bob Lord’s company blog post, Twitter makes no accusation for Twitter’s security breach. Lord does not connect the hack to either incidents involving the major news publications.

According to Twitter themselves:

“This week, we detected unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process moments later. However, our investigation has thus far indicated that the attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords – for approximately 250,000 users.”

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, this isn’t the only major Twitter news lately, as an HMV employee had gone into detail about a mass layoff, upsetting the company in the public eye.

Bob Lord adds:

“As a precautionary security measure, we have reset passwords and revoked session tokens for these accounts. If your account was one of them, you will have recently received (or will shortly) an email from us at the address associated with your Twitter account notifying you that you will need to create a new password. Your old password will not work when you try to log in to Twitter.”

Who could be hacking Twitter and those 250,000 user accounts? We can only say it may be safe to change your password at this point no matter what.

Twitter confirms that it was hacked and 250,000 users may have been compromised tnw.to/g0bDe by @thekenyeung

— The Next Web (@TheNextWeb) February 2, 2013