55,000 Twitter Accounts & Passwords Allegedly Exposed
Hackers claiming to be affiliated with the hacktivist group Anonymous claimed this week to have hacked and published the details of about 55,000 Twitter accounts. All the hacked credentials including account names and passwords are posted in PasteBin. An anonymous Pastebin user posted five extremely long pages of alleged Twitter usernames and passwords to the text storage site on Monday. (Here are pages one, two, three, four and five.) Twitter confirmed it was looking into the situation and said it was resetting the passwords of affected accounts. Later examination of the list by Twitter revealed that it contained 20,000 duplicates, suspended spam accounts and incorrect login credentials. According to a Twitter spokesman "The list of accounts posted to Pastebin contains more than 20,000 duplicates and information for many spam accounts that have already been suspended..." Furthermore, Twitter says, many of the usernames and passwords do not in fact appear to linked to one another, rendering them essentially useless.
Twitter has sent out password resets to accounts that may have been affected and encourages other concerned users to visit the network’s Help Center to change their passwords and review security settings.
-Source (Mashable)