Tens of thousands of Twitter accounts have been compromised in a mass attack, though the wide-scale password leak may not have much tangible effect on the site or its community members.
The passwords for more than 55,000 Twitter accounts were released on Pastebin. The leak was so extensive that the credentials had to be spread across five pages.
It’s not quite clear who leaked the usernames, passwords, and email addresses, though Twitter is addressing the issue.
“We are currently looking into the situation. In the meantime, we have pushed out password resets to accounts that may have been affected,” Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks told CNET in a statement.
Twitter added that more than 20,000 of the accounts and passwords on the Pastebin postings were duplicates, and many of them were spam accounts. Weeks also said that a large number of the passwords and usernames were not actually linked with each other, making the leak rather unusual.
While many of the accounts seem to have been spambots and relatively inconsequential, there’s a chance that your login credentials might appear on the password dump. While Twitter says it’s getting in touch with those affected, it might be worth taking a look at the lists to see if your username appears and take appropriate steps to change your password.
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