No one’s really safe from hackers these days, with Twitter joining the New York Times as one of the recent victims of security breaches recently. Twitter announced in a blog post that it detected unusual access patterns during the week, which led them to discovering attempts to access user data.  The company was able to shut down the attack, but says the hackers may have had access to information like  “usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords.” The number of accounts compromised is pegged to be around 250,000.

Fortunately for Twitter users with compromised accounts, the company went ahead and reset their passwords — those users should be receiving an email to create new passwords. The company also advises users to disable Java on their systems for more security.

While the attacks on Twitter don’t reveal the culprits, the company knows that it wasn’t the work of amateurs. The Verge notes that while they don’t accuse Chinese hackers like the New York Times did, they sort of hint at it in their statements: “The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.”

[via Twitter Blog, The Verge, image via Rosaura Ochoa]