Twitter is hailed as the king of social media. Since it’s focused on real time happenings, most young people prefer it to other sites such as Facebook and Instagram. In fact, they get their news from here instead of radio, TV and newspapers. Due to this popularity, no one wants to be left behind by not having an account. But how safe are Twitter accounts?
A few months ago, Twitter advised all of its 330 million users to immediately change their passwords. Apparently a bug exposed them, causing all users’ passwords to be stored in plain text in an internal log. This sparked fears of account hacking and concerns about private information security, even though Twitter claimed there’s no evidence that the log was misused.
A technique known as hashing is used to store passwords in plain text, but replacing the actual password with random characters. The presence of the bug however meant that passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process.
To change your password:
- Go to the password settings page.
- Enter your current password.
- Choose your new password.
- Save your changes by clicking Save changes.
