Twitter compromised

DAILY DOT COM - Some problems in the TwitterSphere –Friday afternoon, the micro-blogging site acknowledged that 250-thousand accounts had been compromised.

In a blog post, Bob Lord, Director of Information Security wrote:

“This week, we detected unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process moments later. However, our investigation has thus far indicated that the attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords – for approximately 250,000 users.”

No official word on who was behind the attack.  But experts say it wasn't the work of amateurs.  There has been an up-tick in security attacks in the U.S aimed at technology companies.  Within the last two weeks, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have chronicled breaches of their systems.

Search engine Mozilla pulled the plug on Java from its browsers.  That's a computer programming language that allows you to play videos and games.

Whether this was an isolated attack or not -- the best way users can protect themselves is to make sure they use a strong password - at least 10 characters and a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.  

If your Twitter account was compromised, you will receive an email from Twitter at the address associated with your account.  From there you will be asked to create a new password.  Your old password will not work.