Twitter director of Trust and Safety Del Harvey has posted today that it will be forcing a number of users to change their passwords this week after it was discovered that hackers had used torrent sites to steal access to user's data.
"As part of our ongoing efforts to monitor our user base for odd activity, we noticed a sudden surge in followers for a couple of accounts in the last five days. Given the circumstances surrounding this we felt it was best to push out a password reset to accounts that were following these suspicious users," said Harvey.
It is unclear how many users are affected.
The details were stolen from third-party torrent sites that require logins. Because many users use the same information for multiple sites, the hackers used the torrent site logins for Twitter as well.
"As a general rule, if you signed up for a torrent forum or torrent site built by a third party, you should probably change your password there," adds Harvey. "The takeaway from this is that people are continuing to use the same email address and password (or variant) on multiple sites. We strongly suggest that you use different passwords for each service you sign up for."
It is unclear how many users are affected.
The details were stolen from third-party torrent sites that require logins. Because many users use the same information for multiple sites, the hackers used the torrent site logins for Twitter as well.
"As a general rule, if you signed up for a torrent forum or torrent site built by a third party, you should probably change your password there," adds Harvey. "The takeaway from this is that people are continuing to use the same email address and password (or variant) on multiple sites. We strongly suggest that you use different passwords for each service you sign up for."
