250,000 Twitter accounts hacked

Twitter is coming forward as the latest site to be hacked. The social network said in a blog post Friday afternoon that approximately 250,000 user accounts were potentially compromised, with attackers gaining access to information including user names and email addresses, CNN reported.

The company first detected signs of an attack earlier in the week, which led to an investigation and the discovery of a larger breach.

"This week, we detected unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process moments later," said Bob Lord, Twitter's director of information security, in a post."

This attack follows major security breaches at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which were both attributed to Chinese hackers. The New York Times suspects it was in response to negative coverage of the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, and the Journal said evidence pointed to an attempt to "target the monitoring of the Journal's coverage of China."