Twitter hack breaches thousands of accounts
Geez, they should be more careful. This time seems like it was mostly spam accounts, but they have a few strikes against them already.
"A Twitter representative said the company is investigating. He also downplayed the extent of the potential breach, which hit a small sliver of Twitter's 140 million active users.
"It's worth noting that, so far, we've discovered that the list of alleged accounts and passwords found on Pastebin consists of more than 20,000 duplicates, many spam accounts that have already been suspended and many login credentials that do not appear to be linked (that is, the password and username are not actually associated with each other)," Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks said.
Twitter needs to be especially sensitive to security breaches. In March 2011, theFTC finalized a settlement with them rom a pair of data breaches in 2009 that let hackers gain control of Twitter accounts.
Under the settlement's terms, Twitter faces fines and other penalties if it fails to maintain "a comprehensive information security program."
But Twitter has had a few other recent glitches.
Just two months ago, Twitter was forced to temporarily suspend the Web version of its TweetDeck software after a glitch allowed some users access to other users' accounts. Twitter repaired the bug the day after it was publicly exposed.
