Twitter says a security attack late last week managed to gain access to information about around 250,000 of its users. It appears the hackers gained access to usernames, email addresses and encrypted versions of passwords. The service responded by resetting passwords for all affected accounts, which appeared to include many Twitter ‘early adopters’.
Bob Lord, Twitter’s Director of Information Security, wrote in a blog post that “This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked. For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.”