Twitter has sent out a plea for all users to change their passwords, although it says there is no evidence that they have been hacked.
Chief technology officer Parag Agrawal explains that the company uses technology masks to ensure no-one at the company can see the passwords that users set.
“We recently identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log,” he states on his blog. “We have fixed the bug, and our investigation shows no indication of breach or misuse by anyone.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password.”
He adds that users can change their Twitter password by navigating to the settings page.
Explaining how the issue came about, he writes: “We mask passwords through a process called hashing using a function known as bcrypt, which replaces the actual password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter’s system. This allows our systems to validate your account credentials without revealing your password. This is an industry standard.
“Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process. We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.”
Agrawal stresses that there is no reason to believe this password information ever left Twitter’s systems or was misused by anyone, but says users should change their password anyway.
“Change your password on Twitter and on any other service where you may have used the same password,” he says. “Use a strong password that you don’t reuse on other web sites.”
He urges users to also enable login verification, or two-factor authentication, to increase account security. A password manager can also be useful to ensure users have strong passwords enabled on all the sites they use.