Twitter said Friday it had been hit by a "sophisticated" cyber attack similar to those that recently hit major Western news outlets, and that the passwords of about 250,000 users were stolen. Moreover, it was told by Twitter information security director Bob Lord that this attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident.

In fact, the attack coincided with the revelation of several high-profile security breaches. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal said this week that they had been hacked, and pointed to hackers from China. Lord noted that "the attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked.

However, Twitter did not confirm the source of the act.

To say more, as a precaution, Twitter invalidated passwords of accounts at issue and have sent people email messages telling them to create new passwords.

(AW:Samrat Biswas)