For those of you who are Twitter users, there is some rather troubling news concerning privacy. Ever since November 2013, there have been a reported 93,788 accounts vulnerable to a bug that allowed tweets to be delivered to unapproved followers.
The bug allowed people to view tweets that they should have had no access to.
Twitter stated in a blog post, “We were alerted to and fixed a bug in our system that, for 93,788 protected accounts under rare circumstances, allowed non-approved followers to receive protected tweets via SMS or push notifications since November 2013.”
All users affected by the bug have been emailed notifying them of the issue, and the fix that has patched it up.
In addition, Twitter has removed all unapproved follows and have taken steps to prevent any type of similar bug from popping up in the future.
This should serve as a reminder to users that if you’re posting something that really has no place online outside of a small group of people, you may be better off not posting it at all.
Twitter also gives credit to their white hat security community for helping them discover and diagnose the bug. Without them, this bug could have potentially gone undetected and unfixed for even longer.
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