Oman Telecom Reulatory Authority urges Twitter users to change their passwords

The Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRA) has urged all Twitter users in Oman to change their passwords after an advisory by the social media giant asking more than 330mn users worldwide to do the same.

Twitter last week had alerted its users on the issue. It said, “We recently found a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We fixed the bug and have no indication of a breach or misuse by anyone. As a precaution, consider changing your password....”

In a statement, TRA Oman said, “We encourage all Twitter users to change their account passwords due to a recent found bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. Moreover, TRA also encourages Twitter users to activate two-factor authentication.”

Parag Agrawal, chief technology officer, Twitter, had explained on his blog that the company masks passwords through a process called hashing, which replaces the actual password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter’s system. But a bug in the software meant that passwords were stored in a readable form to a log. Twitter is currently implementing plans to prevent this from happening again.