Home > News

Twitter Suggests You Change Your Password After They’re “Unmasked in an Internal Log”

By Laura Tucker
Twitter Suggests You Change Your Password After They’re “Unmasked in an Internal Log” Featured Image

Do you know your Twitter password by heart? That’s great, but the problem is there may be more people than you that know it as well. The social network has announced that stored passwords were “unmasked” by a bug in an internal log.

How does this affect your account? Does this mean someone else is now in possession of your password? What can you do to protect yourself moving forward? We’ll take a look at the situation in this article and what Twitter suggests you do to protect your account.

The Announcement

This bug was announced in the Twitter blog. To soften the blow, Twitter initially explained that they have every intention of keeping your password safe.

news-twitter-passwords-keyboard

Twitter uses a technology that “masks” the password you set for your Twitter account. This ensures that no one at the social network can see it and is designed to keep your account secure.

“We mask passwords through a process called hashing using a function known as bcrypt,” explained the blog, “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.”

They found that with this bug passwords were written to an internal log before the hashing process was finished. After they found the error, they removed the passwords. They stress that it does not appear that the passwords were breached or misused at all. Yet, the folks at Twitter are working on making sure this never happens again.

Changing Your Password and More

news-twitter-passwords-login

Stressing that nothing seems to have been compromised, Twitter is doing everything to be sure it doesn’t happen again, and they want users to do the same. They suggest you take the following steps.

  • Change your password on Twitter itself and also on any other app or website where you used the same password.
  • Be sure to choose a strong password that is not used on other apps or websites.
  • Use two-factor authentication, also know as login verification. They believe it’s the best thing you can do to remain secure.
  • To be sure you’re using strong and unique passwords always and in all situations, use a password manager.

Wrapping Up

Twitter ends the blog saying, “We are very sorry this happened. We recognize and appreciate the trust you place in us and are committed to earning that trust every day.”

They seem to have done everything they could in this situation after they found the bug. There have been services in the past who had similar or worse compromises that didn’t have full disclosure, so that much is appreciated, that they not only took care of it but were honest with users once they found it instead of hiding it. They seem to be doing everything they can to fix it and to make sure users are protected better moving forward.

What are your thoughts on this? Will this change your use of Twitter in the future? Or are password compromises becoming so commonplace that it’s no big deal anymore? Let know what you think!

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.