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Comment by 0xfaded | Hacker News Reader

Just got the email:

  Your account may have been compromised by a website
  or service not associated with Twitter.

I'd like to know how Twitter credentials were compromised from outside Twitter.

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Like they said in the article, Twitter uses bcrypt to store your password, but many of the passwords in the dump were plain text. This suggests that they were scraped together from external sources (i.e. malware on your machine, re-use of a password from one of the other dumps like LinkedIn). Hence, compromised from outside Twitter.

They mention browser password database in the article. If true at the scale of 32M people that would be an even bigger news. Twitter may just be the beginning.

Maybe the malware authors are processing and leaking the data per-website for monetization purposes?

Another way would be that only a specific twitter app has been targeted by the malware.

>They mention browser password database in the article. If true at the scale of 32M people that would be an even bigger news. Twitter may just be the beginning.

No, it's not news at all. Anyone who's been running spyeye, zeus, whatever for a while ends up with a similar amount of logs. They don't tend to get posted publicly, but are regularly sold on various forums.

32M simultaneous installs would be a lot, 32M lifetime installs isn't.

They may've checked the password from the breach against your twitter password. If they match, they know that the password breach data could be (and will eventually) be used to access your twitter account.

Password reuse and phishing are also plausible.

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