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75% Use Same Password
for Twitter and Email, Study Finds
According to a week-long study conducted by Internet security company
BitDefender, over 250,000 user names, email addresses, and passwords
used for Twitter sites can easily be found online.
The study also revealed that 75 percent of Twitter username and password
samples collected online were identical to those used for email
accounts.
The sensitive user data was gathered from blogs, torrents, online
collaboration services and other sources. It was found that 43 percent
of the data was leaked from online collaboration tools while 21 percent
of data was leaked from blog postings. Meanwhile, torrents and users of
other social hubs were responsible for leaking 10 percent and 18 percent
of user data respectively.
BitDefender warned social media users to be careful when setting up
passwords for Twitter platforms and email. The researchers managed to
verify the leaked email accounts and found that 75 percent of users had
one common password for Twitter and accessing their email. Additionally,
the study revealed that 87 percent of email IDs, user names, and
passwords gathered from various sources were still active.
Cybercriminals could easily use this sensitive user data to hijack email
accounts and Twitter profiles and can further be used to spread spam and
malware across those platforms.
BitDefender has advised users to be extra careful while creating
passwords for Twitter and email accounts and avoid using the same
password just for the sake of convenience. Considering the fact that
online collaboration tools are not that adept in protecting sensitive
user information, users have been told to be more careful the next time
they decided to share their emails, user names and passwords with a
third party website.
The study conducted by BitDefender follows the release of a torrent
containing a list of 171 million Facebook users, complete with their
names and Facebook URLs. The security researcher who released the list
for download explained that he was able to extract the names and URLs of
Facebook users from a directory offered by the website itself. Facebook
has maintained that the directory only contains the information users
have themselves chosen to make public and can also be found via search
engines.
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