Twitter is urging its more than 330 million users to change their passwords after the company discovered a glitch that caused some of them to be stored in plain readable text on its internal computer system rather than being obscured by a process known as “hashing”, as is standard practice. While Twitter says its investigation showed that there was no evidence that any breach or misuse of the unmasked passwords occurred, the company is recommending that users change their passwords out of an “abundance of caution,” both on the site itself and any other website or service where they use the same password. According to the company's blog, the bug occurred due to an issue in the hashing process that masks passwords by replacing them with a random string of characters that get stored on Twitter’s system. But due to an error with the system, apparently, passwords were being saved in plain text to an internal log, instead of masking them with the hashing process. Twitter claims to have found the bug on its own and removed the unhashed passwords. The blog did not say how many passwords were affected. Reuters reported that a person familiar with the company’s response said the number was “substantial” and that they were exposed for “several months.” Twitter discovered the bug a few weeks ago and has reported it to some regulators, the Reuters report added. Mishandling user data The disclosure by the company comes at a time where regulators and lawmakers around the…
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