Podcast | The Twitter password fiasco

Alright tweeple - that’s all those people who use twitter to tweet – stop what you’re doing and go change your password. Wait, not right this moment. I mean, after this podcast.

There’s been a minor crisis at twitter. The social media company announced yesterday that it had accidentally unmasked user passwords by storing them unencrypted in an internal log file. In plaintext. Meaning, it is all readable. Yep, some passwords were stored in readable text form. Yay for privacy!

Here’s twitter’s tweet about the password verbatim:

We recently found a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We fixed the bug and have no indication of a breach or misuse by anyone. As a precaution, consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password.

Twitter then had the audacity to post an accompanying link titled Keeping Your Account Secure. Yeah, people did keep their account secure, you birdbrains. You messed up. If that wasn’t patronizing or disingenuous enough, the link leads to a page where the first line reads, and I kid you not, ‘When you set a password for your Twitter account, we use technology that masks it so no one at the company can see it’. And it gets better.