Twitter Warns Vine Users Their Account Information Was Exposed

An issue on Vine servers temporarily exposed public information belonging to the now-defunct video hosting service, Twitter disclosed Friday.

Twitter described the issue as a “bug” and said it was active for less than 24 hours before being patched. However, the issue may have exposed account details of Vine users, including email addresses and phone number.

Read: Vine Shut Down: 9 Celebs You’ll Never Be Able To Watch Again

News of the issue came in the form of a blog post from the official Vine account on Medium. Affected users have been notified via email, which will be personalized for the user depending on what information was exposed.

Twitter is advising all users to be cautious of a suspicious emails or texts they might receive, as they may be targeted by any malicious actor who may have taken advantage of the archive’s availability.

Twitter did not describe the situation as a breach, as no one hacked into their servers to gain access to the user information. However, that is because they wouldn’t have had to; any third party with the technical means could have viewed the user information during the nearly 24-hour window the information was exposed.

According to TechCrunch, the Vine user information was not published on the public-facing Vine archive website where anyone could have visited it, but any person using an API (application program interface) to pull information may have been able to access the data.

Twitter noted that thus far it has no reason to believe the information has been misused, but said Vine only sends communications with users from the @twitter.com domain and never sends emails with attachments or requests for a user’s password.

Read: Vine Is Dead: Twitter Officially Shuts Down Video Service

Since passwords were not a part of the information housed in the archive, users don’t necessarily have to worry about someone gaining access to their account as a direct result of the bug.

However, a malicious actor may be able to cross reference the email address associated with a Vine account to find another account belonging to that user in previous database breaches. Users who use the same passwords across multiple accounts may be at risk.

While Twitter was able to quickly fix and disclose to its users the issue, the incident still serves to show just how much personal information is out there that most people have little to no control over.

Vine has been dead for nearly five months and users have likely moved on from it, forgetting all about the six-second looping videos that populated it. But Twitter has been hanging on to all that information despite no longer supporting the service it came from and it took little more than a technical glitch to expose personal information.

It serves as another reminder why individuals should take as much caution with their information as possible because even companies with the best of intentions can make mistakes and put people at risk.