Microblogging website Twitter has confirmed that unidentified hackers had accessed the website and obtained the data of up to 250,000 of its users.
The passwords and personal information such as email addresses of the 250,000 users could have been found by the hackers, twitter blog post explains.
Within the last two weeks, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have chronicled breaches of their systems, and Apple and Mozilla have turned off Java by default in their browsers.
The Twitter blog post says,
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.
China has been accused of mounting a widespread, aggressive cyber-spying campaign for several years, trying to steal classified information and corporate secrets and to intimidate critics.
Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hacking might not immediately have given any important secrets. But the stolen data could be used track which Internet address a user is posting from. It could be useful for an authoritarian regime trying to keep tabs on a journalist’s movements.
Twitter is having about 200 million users.
