Twitter: hackers have stolen passwords of 250000 users - Telegraph.co.uk

Bob Lord, Twitter's director of security, said: "We encourage all users to take this opportunity to ensure that they are following good password hygiene, on Twitter and elsewhere on the internet. "Make sure you use a strong password – at least 10 (but more is better) characters and a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols." Twitter said in its blog that the attack "was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident". "The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked," the company said. "For that reason we felt that it was important to publicise this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the internet safer for all users." One expert said that the Twitter hack probably happened after an employee's home or work computer was compromised through vulnerabilities in Java, a commonly used computing language whose weaknesses have been well publicised. Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers "a toehold" in Twitter's internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company's system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users' passwords. The relatively small number of users affected suggested either that attackers weren't on the network long or that they were only able to compromise a subset of the company's servers, he said. The online attack comes after hacks into the computer systems of American. media and technology companies, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both newspapers reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers, likely to monitor media coverage the Chinese government deems important. China has been accused of mounting a widespread, aggressive cyber-spying campaign for several years, trying to steal classified information and corporate secrets and to intimidate critics. The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment Saturday, but the Chinese government has said those accusations are baseless and that China itself is a victim of cyber-attacks. "Chinese law forbids hacking and any other actions that damage internet security," the Chinese Defence Ministry said. Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hacking might not immediately have yielded any important secrets. But the stolen credentials could be used to eavesdrop on private messages or track which internet address a user is posting from. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGI_sSW85l25bLBkPuilS5WYmJc6g&url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/9843864/Twitter-hackers-have-stolen-passwords-of-250000-users.html

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