}

On February 1, 2013, the micro-blogging service revealed that approximately 250,000 users’ account information – including usernames, email addresses, and passwords – was potentially compromised.  If you use Twitter and your account was among those the hackers could have broken into, you should have received an email from Twitter notifying you of the attack.

Twitter characterized the cyber criminals as “extremely sophisticated”, becoming aware of the attack only after noticing unusual access patterns in its network.

Article Excerpt:

Posted by Bob Lord (@boblord)
Director of Information Security

As you may have read, there’s been a recent uptick in large-scale security attacks aimed at U.S. technology and media companies. Within the last two weeks, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have chronicled breaches of their systems, and Apple and Mozilla have turned off Java by default in their browsers.

This week, we detected unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process moments later. However, our investigation has thus far indicated that the attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords – for approximately 250,000 users.

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