Mystery surrounds exposure of thousands of Twitter passwords

9 May 2012

Twitter is understood to be investigating how 55,000 user passwords were published online yesterday.

The company said it is looking into the situation and has pushed out password resets to accounts that may have been affected.

Yesterday it emerged that somebody posted 55,000 users’ passwords into Pastebin.

However, Twitter has pointed out that many of these – some 20,000 – are in fact duplicates. That still leaves 30,000 passwords in the wild.

Twitter also pointed out that many of the exposed accounts were in fact spam accounts and incorrect login credentials.

Social network Twitter is also in the news today because it has gone to court in New York in an attempt to quash a court order that requests it turns over information about one of its users who is being prosecuted in connection with the Occupy Wall Street protest on Brooklyn Bridge last year.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com