Time to change your Twitter passwords

If you just signed into Twitter today, you might get a pop-up notification telling you to change your password. The social network is asking all its 330 million users to change passwords after a bug exposed them in plain text. According to Twitter, they haven’t seen any evidence of breach or misuse of the passwords but they still want all users to change passwords out of an “abundance of caution.” And they’re reminding users to change passwords for any other account that might have the same password as those used on Twitter. When you change your password, Twitter will also show you what third-party apps are linked to your Twitter account and you can review the apps you want to revoke access to your account.

The bug caused an issue in the hashing process that masks the passwords and replaces them with random string of characters before it’s stored in Twitter’s system. What happened was the passwords were saved in plain text in the internal log. The social network hasn’t said how many users were affected but asking its entire user base to change passwords might mean it’s affected a lot of its users. Twitter claims it’s found the bug on its own and are working to make sure this and other similar issues don’t happen again.