Twitter says 55,000 accounts hacked report is bogus

Reports released over the last few days have mentioned 55,000 Twitter accounts being hacked, the act that has been affiliated with online hacktivist group, Anonymous. According to Mashable, Twitter has debunked those reports, saying the group mostly posted duplicate information or the usernames and passwords of suspended spam accounts. A Pastebin user, remaining anonymous posted five long pages of Twitter usernames and passwords to the site on Monday and then, Airdemon.net, an aggregator of hacking news, wrote about the hack on Tuesday. The aggregator was then adding to statements going around the web of a large, successful attack on Twitter. Airdemon said that the accounts of public figures were also affected and an insider at Twitter confirmed the success of the attack.

Was Twitter really taken down?

Twitter however, had a representative debunk this statement, saying that the company is investigating the situation, basically calling the reports bogus. A spokesperson also said that the account information posted on Pastebin contain mostly duplicate information and account information of already suspended spam accounts. Twitter has also taken additional steps by sending out emails to users of affected accounts, cautioning them to change their passwords. Any users worried about their Twitter account security are also welcome to change their password and view their security settings in Twitter’s Help Center. This could all, however, very well be just a cover up ruse that Twitter is using.

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Twitter had a potential security issue last month as well, where a bug allowed Tweetdeck users to access accounts that were not their own. Twitter later limited access to Tweetdeck, not allowing users who had logged out to log back in. The discovery of the bug was made by a Twitter user who tweeted that Tweetdeck was giving him access to hundreds of accounts, attaching a screenshot of his desktop Twitter client and then saying Twitter should do something about it. Do you think Twitter was really hacked and 55,000 accounts were compromised? Would it be in Anonymous’ interest to take down Twitter as opposed to taking down specific people on Twitter? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.