Quarter of a million Twitter users have their personal data stolen by hackers in cyber attack
- Social media giant detected attempts to gain access to users’ details
- Hackers may have stolen details from as many as 250,000 users
- Latest in a string of high-profile cyber attacks on major media companies
- Attackers were ‘extremely sophisticated’, says Twitter security chief
PUBLISHED: 05:46, 2 February 2013 | UPDATED: 08:39, 2 February 2013
As many as a quarter of a million Twitter users may have had their personal details stolen by hackers, after the social media giant became the latest victim in a string of high-profile cyber attacks.
Twitter, which has over 200 million active users worldwide, admitted in a blog posting earlier this week it had detected attempts to gain access to its user data.
While the site shut down one attack moments after it was detected, it discovered the ‘extremely sophisticated’ hackers may have managed to access user names, addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 users.
Twitter the pilfered passwords and has said all affected users would receive an e-mail notifying them that they need to create a new password.
The online attack comes on the heels of recent hacks into the computer systems of U.S. media and technology companies, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
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Both American reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important.
Bob Lord, Twitter’s director of information security, said the breach was the work of ‘extremely sophisticated’ attackers.
‘This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident… and we believe other companies and organisations have also been recently similarly attacked,’ he said in a blog post.
‘For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users,’ Mr Lord added.
China has been accused of mounting a widespread, aggressive cyber-spying campaign for several years, trying to steal classified information and corporate secrets and to intimidate critics.
The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment Saturday, but the Chinese government has said those accusations are baseless and that China itself is a victim of cyber-attacks.
‘Chinese law forbids hacking and any other actions that damage ,’ the Chinese Defense Ministry recently said. ‘The Chinese military has never supported any hacking activities.
WTF IS GOING ON
One expert said that the Twitter hack probably happened after an employee’s home or was compromised through vulnerabilities in Java, a commonly used computing language whose weaknesses have been well publicized.
Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers ‘a toehold’ in Twitter’s internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company’s system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users’ passwords.
In a telephone interview Friday, Soltani said that the relatively small number of users affected suggested either that attackers weren’t on the network long or that they were only able to compromise a subset of the company’s servers.
Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hacking might not immediately have yielded any important secrets.
But the stolen credentials could be used to eavesdrop on private messages or track which Internet address a user is posting from.
That might be useful, for example, for an authoritarian regime trying to keep tabs on a journalist’s movements.
‘More realistically, someone could use that as an entry point into another service,’ Soltani said, noting that since few people bother using different passwords for different services, a password stolen from Twitter might be just as handy for reading a journalist’s emails.
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I wonder what the people who have lived using only a plastic card for so long that they have no idea anymore what “real money” is, are going to do when, not if, the monetary system finally collapses and they will no longer be able to use a plastic card?
The major majority of the people have no stored food, no stored water, no more than the gas in their car, rely upon the use of that plastic card for every single purchase they make, and possess no other form of currency. The majority have no savings, no investments, and will suffer greatly from lack of food and water the very day the system collapses.
Of course, they live everyday believing that everything is wonderful and things like that could never happen in the USA. That is something that is going to bite them very hard in the very near future.
Never in all of history, never, has a paper fiat currency not collapsed once the central banks start to buy their own debt. The Federal Reserve Private Corporation Central Bank is now buying its own debt at $85 Billion Dollars a Month!