How to change your Twitter password
- Twitter is urging its 336 million users to change their passwords after a bug
- The social media company discovered a bug that left passwords exposed
- When choosing a new password avoid using solitary words or family names
Twitter is telling everyone to change their passwords. This is not a drill.
In a blog post dated May 3, 2018, Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal revealed that the company spotted bug that left passwords ‘unmasked’ and urged all of its users to choose new passwords ‘out of an abundance of caution’.
‘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,’ Agrawal wrote.
‘Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process. We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.’
On May 3, 2018, Twitter revealed that it discovered a bug and urged its 336 million users to change their passwords.
Although Twitter emphasised that there was no indication of a breach or misuse, all of 336 million Twitter users were urged to update their passwords.
Twitter is trying to stay on top of the issue by notifying all its users with a pop-up box directing them immediately to the password reset page, where they have to input their existing password before typing in a new one.
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. As a precaution, consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. https://t.co/RyEDvQOTaZ
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) May 3, 2018
How to change your Twitter password
To change the Twitter password users must go to the right-hand corner of the website and click on their avatar icon and select Settings and Privacy from the dropdown menu.
Once in Settings and Privacy, click on Password on the left-hand-side of the screen, which will open up a window allowing users to change their old passwords.
Use password managers
Given that living in a 21st-century world means juggling passwords for dozens of sites including Twitter, Facebook and Amazon, tools that help people stay on top of them have increased in popularity.
Tools such as Lastpass and Dashlane generate long, complicated passwords and store them, meaning users don't have to.
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