Twitter passwords stolen from thousands due to hacker attack

The news is quickly spreading across the web: a group of hackers allegedly attacked Twitter, leading to the theft of thousands of passwords.
Initial estimates speak of about 55 thousand stolen passwords, while it is still unclear exactly when the attack actually took place.
The news began to spread on Tuesday, when the site Airdemon.net wrote about this breach involving the microblogging site.
As if that were not enough, to fuel the attack hypothesis suddenly appeared on Pastebin five posts – attributable to the same “author” – packed full of stolen passwords following the attack against Twitter.
Scrolling through these five long lists, it is possible to sometimes notice the presence of accounts belonging to celebrities and well-known faces from all over the world.
Twitter’s staff did not remain silent but responded promptly, especially to make some clarifications.
The hacker attack has not been explicitly either confirmed or completely denied but the severity of the situation has been greatly downplayed: according to Twitter executives, in fact, most of the stolen passwords correspond to “frozen” accounts, meaning accounts that Twitter had already closed in the past because they were reported by users as spammers.

Moreover, there are at least 20 thousand cases of duplicates in the lists posted online: in simple terms, the same accounts with the same passwords are repeated over and over again, thus increasing the rows and numbers but not indicating new accounts.
From Twitter it is thus announced that the situation is being monitored to verify what actually happened and when, because nevertheless – among all the passwords published with their associated accounts – many are indeed still in use.
The only sensible advice at this time is to change your password if you fear you have been affected or if you fear you could be an easy target, perhaps because you use a weak password or the same key to access other sites.