San Francisco [USA], May 4 (NT): Twitter has urged all users to change their passwords after a bug was found that stored passwords in an internal log.
An official statement from Twitter insisted that this unpleasant incident did not rendering its 330 million users to any security fall foul of or breach.
"We recently found a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We fixed the bug and have no indication of a breach or misuse by anyone," the officials of Twitter told in a statement.
Even though the bug was fixed, the company recommended users for taking the precautionary measure, "Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you've used this password."
The micro blogging website company said that they are "implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again."
In a post to Twitter blog, Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal wrote:
“When you set a password for your Twitter account, we use technology that masks it so no one at the company can see it. We recently identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We have fixed the bug, and our investigation shows no indication of breach or misuse by anyone.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. You can change your Twitter password anytime by going to the password settings page.”
Agrawal elaborates the bug as saying that Twitter normally masks user passwords in the course of a state-of-the-art encryption technology called “bcrypt,” which restores the user’s password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter’s system.