Twitter, in concern to the privacy of its users, urges them to change their passwords as a recent glitch spotted by the company might have compromised some passwords to be exposed on its internal computer system.
Twitter’s Chief technology officer Mr.Paraga revealed in an official blog post that a bug was identified causing some user’s passwords going visible in an internal log. He further explained the procedure of masking users’ passwords that keeps the Twitter employees away from the personal information of the users. “We mask passwords through a process called hashing using a function known as bcrypt, which replaces the actual password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter’s system. This allows our systems to validate your account credentials without revealing your password. This is an industry standard.”
The bug found unmasked the passwords before they could go through hashing, causing them all to be seen by the people using the system. However, the company took immediate notice, caught the bug, fixed it and are now preventing such situation to ever happen again, as claimed by Paraga.
The official account of Twitter support assures users in a tweet that no violation of privacy has been reported nor any kind of breach has happened. But for the safe side, it is highly recommended that users consider changing their passwords on Twitter as well as on other accounts where the same password has been used.
We recently found a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We fixed the bug and have no indication of a breach or misuse by anyone. As a precaution, consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. https://t.co/RyEDvQOTaZ
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) May 3, 2018
How to change Twitter Password?
- On your phone: You can easily change your twitter password on your phone. Just go to the main menu of your account, where you’ll see “Setting and Privacy”, click on it. Then go into “Account”, click on “Change Password”, then type your current one and your new one twice. And it’s done.
- On your desktop: Go into your account’s settings, click on the “Password” and it shows the same screen as your phone’s. Type your current one and new password and you are good to go.
Paraga also recommends to keep strong and unique passwords. Also, always enable “Two-factor authentication” which is your login verification. It helps retrieving passwords if lost, keeping your accounts secure from hackers and other cyber security threats.