Twitter is investigating an apparent data breach that resulted in more than 50,000 user names and passwords being posted to the Internet. The data was posted across five pages (one, two, three, four, five) on Pastebin, a favorite site for hackers to post their ill-gotten gains. Ordinarily, when large files are involved, data thieves "tease" their exploits at the site and include a link to a site, like BitTorrent, that supports large file downloads. The maximum file size for Pastebin is 512KB.
Twitter is downplaying the leak because much of the information posted to Pastebin appears to be garbage. There are some 20,000 duplicates, many of the accounts belong to suspended spammers, and some of it consists of "unlinked" information, information where the user name doesn't correspond to the password paired with it.

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