Twitter hit by ‘sophisticated’ cyber attack
Lord referred to an “uptick in large-scale security attacks aimed at US technology and media companies” as he told of Twitter detecting attempts this week to get unauthorised access to data in the firm’s network on Friday.
The attack coincided with the revelation of several high-profile security breaches. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal said this week that they had been hacked, and pointed to attackers from China.
Twitter did not confirm the source of the intrusion. But Lord noted that “the attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organisations have also been recently similarly attacked”.
He said that Twitter shut down a live attack as it was in process. But cyber attackers may have gotten usernames, email addresses, passwords and other data.
As a precaution, Twitter invalidated passwords of accounts at issue and sent people email messages telling them to create new passwords.
Twitter announced in December that the number of active users of the service had topped 200 million, in a sign of soaring growth.
The one-to-many messaging platform is a popular tool used by people around the world to share thoughts, views and news in real time, typically from
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