250,000 Twitter Accounts Compromised: Passwords Hacked And Email Addresses Stolen

Twitter warned Friday that 250,000 users' passwords and email addresses may have been stolen, making it the biggest security breach in the history of the social networking site.

Twitter, which has over 20 million active users, announced its biggest security breach Friday when passwords and email addresses of 250,000 users were reportedly stolen by hackers. The social networking site said that it has been dealing with growing concerns on cyber attacks for some time now but nothing as huge as this has every affected the website.

The website also announced that it has sent out warning messages to all users who may have had their passwords stolen and requested them to reset it. However, security experts have warned that hackers may already be in possession of very valuable customer information as most twitter users have passwords that are similar to what they use for other websites as well as banking purposes.

There is also a huge possibility that the website's "internal network" has been hacked, which means the compromise of more valuable information. The attack came after the website had issued a warning of an earlier attempt to get into users' accounts but was successful in stopping the attack.

"We encourage all users to take this opportunity to ensure that they are following good password hygiene, on Twitter and elsewhere on the Internet," Bob Lord, Twitter's director of security, said. "Make sure you use a strong password - at least 10 (but more is better) characters and a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols."

Twitter has also stated in a blog that they do not suspect this to be the work of amateurs and is not an isolated incident. They are also of the opinion that other companyies may experience a similar attack. Hence they find it necessary to publicize the incident so that other websites can take appropriate measures to prevent similar incidents.