Social media behemoth Twitter has urged users to change their passwords “out of an abundance of caution” after revealing that a bug had exposed them.
In a statement issued this morning, Twitter’s chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal, said the platform had 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,” he said.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password.”
Twitter masks passwords through a process called hashing using a function known as bcrypt, which replaces the actual password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter’s system.
This industry standard practice allows Twitter to validate users’ account credentials without revealing their password.
“Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process,” Agrawal said.
“We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.”
