The login details of over 32 million Twitter accounts may be at risk, according to a search engine LeakedSource which specializes in leaked account credentials. The leak is believed to have been caused through malware infestations rather than a breach of Twitter’s own servers.
LeakedSource, the paid search engine for leaked credentials, was provided the accounts by one single source, and believes the data set to be genuine after confirming 15 account sets to be valid. Due to the join date of some users being recent, the lack of encryption, a large number of accounts with blank or “null” passwords, and differences in the proportion of email domains compared to a full database leak, the search engine feels it could have been sourced through malware affecting browsers, with the domain lists suggesting it largely affected Russian users.
Twitter confirmed to TechCrunch that the accounts were “not obtained by a Twitter data breach – our systems have not been breached. In fact, we’ve been working to help keep accounts protected by checking our data against what’s been shared from recent other password leaks.” In light of other major account leaks in recent weeks, Twitter recommends the use of a “unique, strong password” for its service, and to use suggestions in its help center to increase account security.
Some analysis was also performed on the data set, revealing both what the most popular domains of email accounts were, as well as passwords. For domains, the top listing was mail.ru, used with over 5 million accounts, followed by yahoo.com,hotmail.com, gmail.com, and yandex.ru. Of the top ten passwords, six were digits in ascending order starting from 1, such as “123456”, two others were simple number passwords, and the only listings using letters were “qwerty” and “password” in third and fourth place.
