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And for people trying to puzzle out who was impacted, several these accounts (all with random strings for passwords, btw) were barely ever used at all, often no
by dewitt 14y ago
And for people trying to puzzle out who was impacted, several these accounts (all with random strings for passwords, btw) were barely ever used at all, often not for several years. The only thing they had in common was their early creation date, and hence relatively low user ids. My guess is that the hackers simply scanned user ids starting from 1 and worked their way up.
- guelo 14y agoThat would explain the high incidence among hackers, who are more often early adopters. I've been surprised by how many people I've heard of getting the email, including people in this comment thread and myself, considering only 250,000 emails were sent out of their couple hundred million accounts.
- baconhigh 14y agoany chance it was through an app that you allowed access?
- dewitt 14y agoNo. I suspect their email template was out of sync with this particular incident.
- jandy 14y agoI've been suspecting the same thing. Two of my accounts received the email, both created several years ago, while none of my newer accounts have been compromised.
- timdorr 14y agoAre there big gaps in the early user ids? I'm 4145801 and received this message.
- nevster 14y agoYeah - I'd say there are big gaps. I'm 1577581 and got the email. You can check people's join dates here http://www.whendidyoujointwitter.com/ http://www.whendidyoujointwitter.com/
- lacerus 14y agoThanks! I'm 793689, joined 25 February 2007, and got the e-mail.
- bitbckt 14y agoTwitter employee, here. At one point in time, auto_increment_increment was > 1 on the MySQL master for uid generation. This led to many holes in the uid range.
- newbie12 14y agoYeah I received the email from Twitter, account created in April 2007 and haven't tweeted since 2010.
- brucehoult 14y agoOnly 2950 accounts with IDs from 1 to 6136 still exist, so there's been pretty much a 50% attrition rate at that level.
- fredoliveira 14y agoI'm seeing a ton of people I know on twitter complain - I'm user 5511, and these are people who joined at the very beginning too - so your theory is indeed apparently correct. I got an email myself, and reset my already super complex password.
- jschuur 14y agoUser 5,260 and an active, daily users. Got an email that my account was impacted.
- iomike 14y ago3750 and ditto.
- p4bl0 14y agoI don't know what # user I am (how can I get this information?) but my twitter account was also created in 2007 (on the 8th of April says whendidyoujointwitter.com) and is still active. Also received the email.
- chris24 14y agoThe Twitter API exposes a user's ID. Some Twitter clients (like Tweetbot) show this information. You can use http://mytwitterid.com/ http://mytwitterid.com/ to find yours.
- paulgb 14y agoOr just view source on twitter.com (after logging in) and search for the first instance of "data-user-id"
- fakeer 14y agoThat means https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?user_id=12 https://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?user_id=12 13 14 were hacked too. And those must have been accounts of interest if not of others' and the gentry.