Twitter casts doubt on leak of 55,000 logins

Twitter has cast doubt on a series of login details posted online, saying many of the credentials are duplicates, spam accounts or inaccurate.

Last night, five posts appeared on Pastebin containing what appeared to be 55,000 sets of logins and passwords for Twitter. It wasn’t clear who posted the data, which remains available on the site at the time of writing.

A Twitter spokeswoman told PC Pro the site was investigating the incident, and password resets had already been pushed out to affected accounts.

“It’s worth noting that, so far, we’ve discovered that the list of alleged accounts and passwords found on Pastebin consists of more than 20,000 duplicates, many spam accounts that have already been suspended and many login credentials that do not appear to be linked (that is, the password and username are not actually associated with each other),” the spokeswoman said.

The logins don’t appear to be for valid accounts. Some are email addresses rather than login names, while a small selection tested by PC Pro all went to suspended or non-existent accounts, although it isn’t clear if Twitter has shut down those accounts in reaction to the leak. A thread on HackerNews suggested the accounts predominately appeared to be spambots, but other posters said at least some of the data appeared to be valid.