Leaked Twitter accounts 'mostly banned spammers'

Twitter has downplayed the significance of a data dump that leaked the login details of 55,000 twits. Most of the usernames and passwords copied into a string of five Pastebin posts on Monday are either duplicates or belong to blocked spammers, according to the micro-blogging site. A spokesman said it was in the process of …

[Jeebus]

Why not just say "50,000 accounts have suffered a password leak" there is no difference in account types as all Twitter accounts are worthless spam peddling filth anyway.

[Roger Stenning]

Go blow it out yer bunny slippers, squire...

Like many others, I have a twitter account, and also like the vast majority of those others, I don't spam anyone, so kindly stop with the mile-wide paintbrush.

[Richie Hindle]

Failing Passwords 101?

Does this mean Twitter stores plain text passwords rather than hashes?

It seems incredible that they would, but if they don't, why haven't they come straight out and said so?

[Dark Horse]

Re: Failing Passwords 101?

Quote from the article: "It's unclear how the credentials were obtained, although one strong possibility is that hackers slurped the data from a phishing website that tricked users into revealing their login details."

[Richie Hindle]

Re: Failing Passwords 101?

@Dark Horse: Sure, but then surely Twitter's response would be "It's physically impossible for hackers to obtain passwords from us, because we don't store them. The only possible way they could have been obtained is via a social engineering attack."

[RogerBoffin]

Re: Failing Passwords 101?

Look at passwords on pastebin: most of them look randomly generated, not the kind of passwords most people would use. A simple search doesn't bring up any results for 'password' or 'monkey', two of the most commonly used passwords, and only a couple for 'qwerty'.

[edge_e]

How long until we see an email saying

Check to see if your twitter account is one of the 55000 hacked

click this link and type in your username and password