In a move that will improve confidence of users in Twitter, the social media giant has squashed a bug that allowed anyone to receive tweets from protected accounts.
 
The bug was in existence since November 2013. It allowed even non-approved followers to see tweets from protected accounts. Interestingly, not many users were aware of this bug.
 
“We were alerted to and fixed a bug in our system that, for 93,788 protected accounts under rare circumstances, allowed non-approved followers to receive protected tweets via SMS or push notifications since November 2013. As part of the bug fix, we’ve removed all of these unapproved follows, and taken steps to protect against this kind of bug in the future,” Bob Lord, Director, Information Security at Twitter wrote in a blog post.

    

Even though, it affected only about 100,000 accounts, the fact that Twitter admitted it and resolved the issue would boost confidence of its subscribers.
 
The bug was discovered by Twitter’s white hat security community. “Thankfully, now that the fix has come, your protected account is secure again. We’ve emailed each of these affected users to let them know about this bug and extend our whole-hearted apologies,” wrote Bob Lord.