Yesterday, we wrote that Twitter asked some users to reset their password as a security measure. We suspected that the reason was a phishing attack on Twitter, and now Twitter has officially confirmed it, with a bit of background.
Recently, Twitter admins discovered a surge of followers to some suspicious accounts, decided to investigate, and discovered that a number of accounts were compromised through an intricate attack involving torrent-related sites and forums. Here’s Twitter’s explanation of what went down:
“It appears that for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly well-crafted sites and forums to other people innocently looking to start a download site of their very own. However, these sites came with a little extra — security exploits and backdoors throughout the system. This person then waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up. Additional exploits to gain admin root on forums that weren’t created by this person also appear to have been utilized; in some instances, the exploit involved redirecting attempts to access the forums to another site that would request log-in information. This information was then used to attempt to gain access to third party sites like Twitter. We haven’t identified all of the forums involved (nor is it likely that we’ll be able to, since we don’t have any connection with them), but as a general rule, if you’ve signed up for a torrent forum or torrent site built by a third party, you should probably change your password there.”
Well, folks, I guess it all boils down to the same old advice: never use the same email/password combination on multiple sites.
Tags: hack, security, torrent, trending, twitter,
