Twitter downplays reports of 55,000 hacked accounts

Hackers purportedly affiliated with the hacktivist group Anonymous claimed this week to have accessed and published the details of about 55,000 Twitter accounts.

But Twitter said those claims are largely bogus, and that the group mostly posted duplicate information or username and password information for suspended spam accounts.

An anonymous Pastebin user posted five extremely long pages of alleged Twitter usernames and passwords to the text storage site on Monday. (Here are pages one, two, three, four and five.) The hacking news aggregator Airdemon.net reported the supposed breach on Tuesday, beginning to fuel speculation around the web of a massive successful attack on Twitter's servers. Airdemon said celebrity accounts were among those compromised, and also claimed to have information from a "Twitter insider" confirming the attack.