Hackers steal passwords of a quarter million Twitter users

A quarter of a million Twitter users have had their personal details stolen by hackers, as the social media giant became the latest victim in a series of high-profile cyber attacks.

Twitter, with over 200 million active users worldwide, admitted in a blog posting earlier this week that it had detected attempts to gain access to its user data.

Even as it successfully foiled one attack soon on detection, it found that 'extremely sophisticated' hackers might have managed to access user names, e-mail addresses and encrypted passwords of over 250,000 users.

After resetting the compromised passwords, Twitter said all affected users would receive an e-mail notifying them that they needed to create a new password.

The micro-blogging site was not the only media company frantically reassessing its information security; US firms including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post too had fallen victim to hackers.

According to the American publications their computer systems were targeted by hackers in China.