Twitter May Have Been Hit By Another Data Breach 

January 7, 2019

Written by wukovits

2018 hasn’t been a great year for social media, with all the major platforms suffering a number of significant data breaches at various points in the year.  Twitter alone has seen several, including the biggest one in May when the company urged all of its 330 million users to reset their passwords. This was after a glitch in the system that exposed all user passwords, displaying them in plain text.

In September of this year, another glitch exposed users’ direct messages to third-party app developers. Now, most recently, Twitter was hit with a new problem. One of their support forums (used by Twitter account holders to report problems) was breached, allowing the hackers to gain limited access to user information.

The official announcement from the company includes:

“…During our investigation, we noticed some unusual activity involving the affected customer support form API.  Specifically, we observed a large number of inquiries coming from individual IP addresses located in China and Saudi Arabia.  While we cannot confirm intent or attribution for certain, it is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors.”

It’s this last bit that is the most disturbing.  State-sponsored digital terrorism is a large and growing concern, with the recent accusations that Russia may have tried to influence US elections.

In this case, the company tried to assure its users that the data exposed was quite limited to the country code associated with each user, account status (locked or unlocked) and partial phone numbers.

The issue has been resolved, and Twitter has contacted the small number of impacted users directly, emphasizing that no action on their part is necessary.  It does, however, underscore the point that the platforms we rely so heavily on are under constant threat. Even if you take great care to safeguard your data personally, that may not be enough.

Used with permission from Article Aggregator

Bayou Tech

We provide solutions for your business. Find out how we can help.

Related Articles

New Graphene Technology May Increase Hard Drive Storage

HDDs are old, well understood technology. They haven't changed much in recent years. In fact, increasingly, people are writing them off, preferring SSDs for their greater speed and smaller size, even though HDDs are less expensive. The clever folks at the University...

Some Amazon Device Features May Have Security Risks

Have you heard of Amazon Sidewalk? If not, it's definitely something you should be aware of. Depending on your point of view, the new feature, which was enabled by default on a wide range of Amazon devices by default on June 8 of this year (2021) is either...

Email Unsubscribe Scam Can Easily Fool Any User

Scammers are increasingly relying on a tried and true bit of social engineering to fool unsuspecting users into unwittingly signing up to receive a flood of additional spam email. They accomplish this by blasting out an email asking recipients if they wish to...

Send us a message

Your message was sent.