50,000 Twitter Accounts’ Data is Publicly Available – Tech Thursday

If you're a fan of the 140 character microblogging service like me, you tend to check it regularly and post just as regular. And like many of the other services out there has it's share of spam and phishing attempts. Well one seemed to work and someone or group of hackers, managed to get the data from 50,000 twitter account and then put it up on the internet for everyone.

But after some checking by the folks at Twitter, the list of email and password combinations that were stolen then posted to Pastebin earlier this week, 20,000 of them are duplicates, many of which are suspended accounts because of spamming. Twitter says they are looking into the matter more and have pushed password resets to accounts that were affected. They also suggest, that if you are worried about this situation, then you should reset your password.

While the breach itself is a worrying, something interesting was found about the breach. There was a statistically noticeably larger amount of Microsoft email accounts over many other email providers, with many of the passwords looking to be randomly generated ones. What this data can show is actually pretty helpful in that it gives security researches more info on how spammers are using accounts to spam and create other accounts for spamming. Will it help decrease the flow of spam on the internet? Maybe.

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