The popular social network Twitter was recently attacked by hackers, who successfully made off with the account details for some 55,000 users, and then posted them on the filesharing site Pastebin.
Many of the accounts that were affected were those of spammers who sent bogus messages to Twitter users, but some legitimate users may have also been effected, according to a report from
ZDNet. The company is looking into the breach, and advising those users who might have had the safety of their accounts compromised to change their passwords. Currently, it is unclear who caused the breach.
"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," a Twitter spokesperson told the news site.
Ondrej Krehel, chief information security officer for
Identity Theft 911, has a blog about the dangers hackers pose to consumers using social networks and other websites.
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