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Twitter is urging all of its 330 million users to change their passwords after a software glitch unintentionally exposed its users' passwords by storing them in readable text on its internal computer system. The social media network disclosed the issue in an official blog post and a series of tweets from Twitter Support. According to Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal, Twitter hashes passwords using a popular function known as bcrypt, which replaces an actual password with a random set of numbers and letters and then stored it in its systems. This allows the company to validate users' credentials without revealing their actual passwords, while also masking them in a way that not even Twitter employees can see them. However, a software bug resulted in passwords being written to an internal log before completing the hashing process—meaning that the passwords were left exposed on the company's internal system. Parag said Twitter had found and resolved the problem itsel

Only after a few days of Uber admitting last year's data breach of 57 million customers , the popular image sharing site disclosed that it had suffered a major data breach in 2014 that compromised email addresses and passwords of 1.7 million user accounts. In a blog post published on Friday, Imgur claimed that the company had been notified of a three-year-old data breach on November 23 when a security researcher emailed the company after being sent the stolen data. Imgur Chief Operating Officer (COO) then alerted the company's founder and the Vice President of Engineering to the issue before began working to validate that the data belonged to Imgur users. After completing the data validation, the company confirmed Friday morning that the 2014 data breach impacted approximately 1.7 million Imgur user accounts (a small fraction of its 150 million user base) and that the compromised information included only email addresses and passwords. Since Imgur has never asked fo

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

Another day, another data breach. This time a popular video sharing platform DailyMotion has allegedly been hacked and tens of millions of users information have been stolen. Breach notification service LeakedSource announced the data breach on Monday after the company obtained 85.2 Million records from Dailymotion. According to LeakedSource, the DailyMotion data breach appears to have taken place on October 20, 2016, which means it is possible that hackers have been circulating the data for over a month. The stolen data consists of 85.2 Million unique email addresses and usernames and around 20 percent of the accounts (more than 18 Million users) had hashed passwords tied to them. The passwords were protected using the Bcrypt hashing algorithm with ten rounds of rekeying, making it difficult for hackers to obtain user's actual password. Bcrypt is a cryptographic algorithm that makes the hashing process so slow that it would literally take centuries to actual brute-

Last month, when hackers leaked nearly 100 gigabytes of sensitive data belonging to the popular online casual sex and marriage affair website ' Ashley Madison ', there was at least one thing in favor of 37 Million cheaters that their Passwords were encrypted . But, the never ending saga of Ashley Madison hack could now definitely hit the cheaters hard, because a group of crazy Password Cracking Group, which calls itself CynoSure Prime , has cracked more than 11 Million user passwords just in the past 10 days, not years. Yes, the hashed passwords that were previously thought to be cryptographically protected using Bcrypt, have now been cracked successfully. Bcrypt is a cryptographic algorithm that makes the hashing process so slow that it would literally take centuries to brute-force all of the Ashley Madison account passwords. How do they Crack Passwords? The Password cracking team identified a weakness after reviewing the leaked data, which included u

Passwords are the first line of defense against cyber criminals. It is the most vital secret of every activity we do over the internet and also a final check to get into any of your user account, whether it is your bank account, email account, shopping cart account or any other account you have. We all know storing passwords in clear text in your database is ridiculous. Many desktop applications and almost every web service including, blogs, forums eventually need to store a collection of user data and the passwords, that has to be stored using a hashing algorithm. Cryptographic hash algorithms MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, SHA-3 are general purpose hash functions, designed to calculate a digest of huge amounts of data in as short a time as possible. Hashing is the greatest way for protecting passwords and considered to be pretty safe for ensuring the integrity of data or password. The benefit of hashing is that if someone steals the database with hashed passwords, they o