Reports indicate that there has been a massive leak of login credentials for Twitter, one of the world's most used social media platform.
The number reportedly reaches 32 million. Their passwords have been compromised and are now online. The belief is that it is now on sale on the dark web, though Twitter maintains that the leak is not as a result of a breach of its systems.
“We are confident that these usernames and credentials were not obtained by a Twitter data breach – our systems have not been breached. In fact, we’ve been working to help keep accounts protected by checking our data against what’s been shared from recent other password leaks,” says a spokesperson for Twitter.
The leaked data is said to contain usernames, passwords, and email addresses of 32,888,30 users. LeakedSource, a search engine for leaked login credentials, believes that these credentials have been stolen through malware infecting popular browsers like Chrome and Firefox, instead of a breach of Twitter’s systems. The bulk of the users affected by this leak appear to be from Russia.
This hasn't been the only breach in recent times, both LinkedIn and MySpace have also suffered breaches such as this and as a precaution users are advised not to use the same password everywhere.
Different services should have different passwords and having a two-factor authentication enables on services that offer this additional security feature would not be amiss either.
