Twitter reported a mass hacking of the user accounts

About a quarter of a million people  of the social network Twitter were victims mass hacking accounts. Twitter the company notes that been "extremely difficult" hacker attack, and it could well turn up other prominent Internet companies, said on Twitter. The blog Twitter on Friday night there was a message, according to which the service provider microblogging force reset passwords for 250,000 blogs after the automated system recorded the unauthorized attempts to access user information in Twitter.

Among the data that interested hackers have your email address and password crypted version. It is noted that the attack was aimed at a specific group of users Twitter, in particular at the earliest users of the service, and is listed among such holders of the company, its management, investors and employees. "This attack is definitely the work of advanced hackers, and we are pretty sure that this is not the only incident," - said the director of information security Twitter Robert Lord. "The attack was extremely challenging, we also have reason to believe that a number of others were also selected ogranizatsii purposes of attack."


Users whose accounts were in the crosshairs of hackers had sent instructions to reset your password. In an interview with Bob Lord said the attack appeared to have been carried out by a phishing campaign through a series of fraudulent websites, including sites counterfeit Twitter.

In Twitter saying that the attack is related to the latest Vulnerability in Java, which was first discovered by a couple of weeks ago. This vulnerability caused a lot of noise associated with the operations of the Java. So, earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said that it encourages all its subordinate structures to prevent a Java work on employee computers. The day before yesterday, Apple has made Java a blacklist of non-recommended to run applications and Mozilla announced that the upcoming version of Firefox will block all browser plug-ins by default, including Java, Adobe Reader and Microsoft Silverlight. An exception was made for Adobe Flash Player.


Oracle Corporation itself almost simultaneously, statements Twitter sent an SOS message that has released a new version of Java 7 Update 13, which is now available to all for free download and where the developer has eliminated nearly 50 vulnerabilities, including the highly-critical problems. In Oracle said that originally planned to release an updated version of Java until the middle of February, but hurry with the release, due to the special danger bug.

This week edition of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that they had been targeted hacking attacks, which was closed to journalists and editorial information computers reporters working on China issues.

In Twitter say the company and is currently under attack in the coming hours and its impact will be blocked. Lord says that all network users still only recommended resistant to cracking passwords.