LONDON: As many as 32 million Twitter passwords were reportedly on sale for 10 Bitcoin ($5,775), as Leaked Source, a search engine for stolen data, claimed it had been passed a humongous dataset by an anonymous party.
Though, Twitter doesn’t believe it was hacked, Leaked Source reveals that usernames and passwords were pilfered via malware infections, without specifying how any Twitter credential-theft virus might have spread. But the data, as far as Leaked Source is aware, is real.
There’s been a spate of Twitter account hacks too, from Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg to musician Bon Iver. One of our own writers had their account hacked today too, though they swiftly recovered it.
It’s become equally clear – on the back of recent mega-breaches of Myspace, Tumblr and many more – it’s not difficult to prevent accounts from being hijacked with some rudimentary digital hygiene. Here are two simple steps to keep your tweets safe from those who would use them for disseminating salacious or dangerous material, be it porn or spam links.
Not a month goes past without me recommending a password manager to someone. It’s simple: download an app – LastPass, 1Password, KeePass all come recommended – and use their random password generators to create a secure login for you. All you’ll need to unlock those passwords is your own unique, hopefully-unguessable password. That means across all your web services, you’ll have a secure password that’s incredibly difficult to crack, even if the service provider gets hacked.
The story originally appeared in Forbes
