Twitter director of Trust and Safety Del Harvey has posted today that it will be forcing a number of users to change their passwords this week after it was discovered that hackers had used torrent sites to steal access to user’s data.
“As part of our ongoing efforts to monitor our user base for odd activity, we noticed a sudden surge in followers for a couple of accounts in the last five days. Given the circumstances surrounding this we felt it was best to push out a password reset to accounts that were following these suspicious users,” said Harvey.
It is unclear how many users are affected.
The details were stolen from third-party torrent sites that require logins. Because many users use the same information for multiple sites, the hackers used the torrent site logins for Twitter as well.
“As a general rule, if you signed up for a torrent forum or torrent site built by a third party, you should probably change your password there,” adds Harvey. “The takeaway from this is that people are continuing to use the same email address and password (or variant) on multiple sites. We strongly suggest that you use different passwords for each service you sign up for.”
Result for: torrent sites
Anti-piracy outfit BREIN has proudly announced this week that it shut down 393 torrent sites in 2009, with the largest being massive indexer Mininova, which was forced to go legal.
Overall, the group shut down 615 “illegal websites,” with the good majority being torrent trackers.
Additionally, 35 eD2K servers were taken down, 38 streaming movie stires, and 14 NZB (Usenet portals) were part of the group.
TF is reporting that the sites taken down must be very, very small since they received “a grand total of zero emails requesting information on the other several hundred closures.” (Not including Mininova, TorrentVault)
As is always the case with torrent site shutdowns anyway, one goes down and at least one new one goes up to take its place.
Result for: torrent sites
In early March, the much anticipated horror sequel Resident Evil 5 was leaked to torrent sites and P2P, a full ten days before its official release date. Capcom was understandably upset, but launch month sales were spectacular and it appears those sales remain strong despite the leak.
Capcom CFO Kazuhiko Abe adds that sales of the sequel are currently at 4.97 million and rising, on “very strong demand”.
Abe notes that the company sold 4.4 million units in March alone, and that the title will top 5 million within days.
The publisher, like all other major publishers, has complained of piracy woes in the past, even citing piracy as the main reason Devil May Cry 4 had stagnant sales. The publisher said the PC version of the game had been “pirated to hell” and that Capcom Japan refused to release it digitally as a result.
