About 250,000 Twitter users suffered a ‘sophisticated’ cyber attack

February 2, 2013
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Twitter explained in its blog, “About 250,000 user accounts of the social network were the subject of a ‘sophisticated’ cyber attack this week, days after the webs of U.S. newspapers The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were also hacked.”

“Twitter determined that hackers could have accessed confidential user information, such as email addresses, encrypted versions of passwords and login credentials of ‘approximately 250,000 users’. However, ‘only a small number of users were potentially affected by this attack’.”

“This attack was not the work of amateurs and we do not believe that is an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated and believe that other companies and organizations recently suffered similar attacks.”

“Twitter detected this week about ‘unusual access patterns’ representing ‘attempts to access unauthorized users of Twitter data’. We discovered an attack when it was taking place and we were able to placate the meantime. “