Twitter users around the world have witnessed a downtime for a couple of hours on Thursday. An official statement from the social network giant says that the downtime could have been caused due to a bug in its internal servers which could have also exposed login info of more than 330 million Twitter users.
According to reliable sources, the leak includes info of mostly ‘twitteratis’ from US, UK, Mexico, and Japan.
Just a few hours ago, Twitter issued a public statement urging all its users to change their password ‘out of an abundance of caution’.
Although the social media giant admits that it has addressed the bug with a security patch, it still isn’t ready to take chances. So, it is requesting all its users to replace their current passwords with a strong one.
The San Francisco based company has tweeted to its 5.77 million followers that no evidence of data breach or misuse has been found for now and has urged users, especially, the ones with a long list of followers to go for a password restore.
Twitter is said to use a hashing function named Bcrypt to mask user passwords on its servers. a Thus, in this process, it replaces the text with random numbers and letters which are hard to calculate.
Now, to those who are about to change their passwords, here’s a piece of advice from Cybersecurity Insiders-
• Always choose a password which has a combination of numbers, symbols, uppercase and lowercase letters.
• Ensure that the password is at least 8 characters long
• Make sure that you log out of websites and devices after you have finished using them.
• Never use a password such as 12345, password, qwerty, iloveyou, 11111 as they are easily guessable to hackers.
• Never use a derivate name, family members name, pets name, phone number and address or birthday as a password.
• Never say ‘yes’ when your browser asks for your permission to save the password for future use.
Hope, these security tips help!
