Twitter Breached, 50K Accounts Posted to Internet - finneyteredly

Twitter aforesaid Wednesday that it is continuing to investigate an apparent data breach that resulted in more than 50,000 user names and passwords being posted to the Cyberspace.

The data was posted across five pages (one, two, three, quatern, five) on Pastebin, a favorite website for hackers to post their diabetic gotten gains. Ordinarily, when ample files are Byzantine, information thieves "tease" their exploits at the site and admit a link to a site, like BitTorrent, which supports large file downloads. The supreme file size for Pastebin is 512 KB.

Chirrup is downplaying the leak because more than of the information posted to Pastebin appears to cost garbage. There are whatever 20,000 duplicates, many of the accounts consist to suspended spammers and some of it consists of "unlinked" information, information where the user name doesn't equate to the watchword paired with it.

In addition, there's evidence that some of the accounts are duds created by robot programs. An psychoanalysis of a random extract of 20 accounts performed by Hacker Newsworthiness revealed that no had more than six following, all that weren't suspended were following thousands of people, all had similar passwords that looked auto-generated and many had unanswered messages asking them to confirm their netmail addresses.

Adrian Lamo

Another hacker, Adrian Lamo—infamous for ratting on Bradley Manning, the G.I. who leaked thousands of sensible United States documents to WikiLeaks—rapped the quality of the leak. "These files dated noncurrent to circa early-to-mid 2011, demonstrating that if a via media had interpreted place, it was not recent, and quite a possibly/in all probability not one involving Twitter," He wrote on his Facebook Thomas Nelson Page.

"They contain no e-mail addresses belonging to sensitive domains, they answer non include Chirrup faculty, notably they wear't include me, quite possibly the well-nig hated ex-husband-cyber-terrorist alive in the eyes of the hacker community, and they in fact seem quite random," he observed.

"I've seen lists care these before," he continued, "and, without elision, fragments of this list are what I'd expect from a solicitation of phished passwords sewn collectively into a larger name, freshened skyward a bit to obscure their antiquity, and presented A something new and interesting."

According to a Twitter spokesperson, the company is pushing password resets to affected accounts. Meanwhile, the microblogging service is searching for answers about who leaked the account info and why they did it.

Information technology is ironic that so many of the accounts on the face of it belong to spammers, since last month Chirrup trumpeted its efforts to combat spam on the service by filing a lawsuit against Phoebe of the most aggressive spammers and junk e-mail tool makers targeting the microblogging site.

How the account information was obtained by the data thief is also important to Twitter, since IT is operating low-level an understanding with the U.S. Federal Barter Commission to protect its members' seclusion. That accord was finalized last year and stemmed from two hacking attacks on the service in 2009 where just about drunk profile Twitter members, including President Obama, lost control of their accounts.

Follow self-employed technology author John P. Mello Jr. and Today@PCWorld on Twitter.