Twitter May Have Been Hit By Another Data Breach

2018 has not been a very good year for social media sites. Several mainstream platforms suffered several significant data breaches last year. Twitter, for one, has gone through several breaches including the major one that happened last May, which forced the company to ask over three million users to have their password changed. The data breach exposed the passwords of all Twitter users in plain text due to a glitch in the system.

Another glitch took place in September but this time, the direct messages of the users were exposed to third party app developers. But that was not the end of it. The company was hit by another problem. One of the support forums, where Twitter users reported problems in the platform was breached. The breach gave hackers limited access to the information of all user members.

In an official statement released by the company, Twitter said:

"...During our investigation, we noticed some unusual activity involving the affected customer support form API.  Specifically, we observed a large number of inquiries coming from individual IP addresses located in China and Saudi Arabia.  While we cannot confirm intent or attribution for certain, it is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors."

This is the most disturbing part. Digital terrorism that is sponsored by the state is a huge and growing concern, especially with the recent news that Russia had tried to meddle with the US elections.

In this case, Twitter tried their best to assure users that the exposed data was restricted only to the country code that is linked to each user, their account status, as well as partial phone numbers.

This problem has been resolved, and the company has called the small number of affected users directly, making sure that they do not need to do anything. However, it underscores the point that the social platforms that we use, on a daily basis for some, are always under threat. Even if you do everything you can to protect your data, that might not just be enough.

Call SpartanTec, Inc. if you want to know how you can protect your data from online threats. 

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