Over 330 Million Twitter Users Urged to Change Their Password due to a Discovered System Bug

Most of us get to enjoy the benefits of sharing our thoughts, images, and personal relationships over many of the social media services that are available. Unfortunately, with the use of many social media sites comes the looming threat of hackers attacking such an infrastructure or stealing personal data that belongs to literally hundreds of millions to billions of users. In the recent happenings revolving around personal data security, Twitter has urged over 330 million of their users to change their password immediately due to a software bug that may have unprotected an internal log.

The discovered Twitter bug is one that appears to have laid out the passwords for millions of Twitter users in plain-text instead of the traditional encrypted characters that one would find if they ever infiltrated such data in any other case. The internal log, which Twitter claims was not leaked or misused, stored passwords in their original plain-text form where if someone was able to view the log they could compromise just about all of the social media's 330 million-plus user's accounts.

Since the discovery of the bug, Twitter has fixed the issue and prompted all users to change their passwords through a pop-up window on the site briefly explaining the bug, as shown in figure 1 below. The pop-up message that users are witnessing today is one that each user will see upon signing into Twitter. The message provides a quick link for entering their Twitter settings page to change their password.

Figure 1. Twitter pop-up window urging users to change their password and explaining the recent bug.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, said in a tweet after the bug discovery that the company believed that it was important to "be open about this internal defect." With such openness, it's rather refreshing to have a CEO own up a security flaw that could have affected millions. Twitter's CTO, Parag Agrawal, went on to say in a tweet, "We are sharing this information to help people make an informed decision about their account security. We didn't have to, but believe it's the right thing to do."

In the past Twitter has been in the same foray of many other companies and social media giants facing the scrutiny of not handling security issues as their users and investors saw fit. After Facebook has succumbed to their very own privacy issue surrounding Cambridge Analytica's mishandling of personal information, people are on edge about the ways in which companies handle their private data.

Currently, Twitter isn't divulging any information on how the bug stored passwords in plain-text in an internal log. However, Twitter is reiterating that the bug is not a breach.

CBS News Video: "Twitter Urging Users To Change Password After Internal Password Bug Discovered"

While Twitter as assured many that the so-called password bug is not a data breach or leak of personal data, many will take the idea in its totality and believe what they will. With such, as news outlets propagate the information at hand, many will take the Twitter bug to be something more severe than it is mostly because of past occurrences of massive data breaches that have affected millions and leaked personal information. Either way we take it, let it be a lesson to us all to always stay vigilant by running anti-virus or anti-malware software, keep your software up-to-date, update your passwords often, utilize strong passwords, and never divulge personal information that you don't want other people viewing.