Are 32 million Twitter passwords being sold on the dark web?

Millions of Twitter passwords have reportedly surfaced online and are being sold on the dark web.

LeakedSource, which collects credentials from data breaches, says it has received more than 32 million records, including email addresses, usernames and passwords.

"We have very strong evidence that Twitter was not hacked, rather the consumer was," it says.

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A spokesperson for the social media giant said it was "confident" its systems had not been breached.

LeakedSource believes that malware was responsible for the breach and sent usernames and passwords saved in browsers such as Chrome and Firefox to the hackers.

A Russian, known by his alias Tessa88, is selling the credentials for 10 bitcoins, or about £4,000, according to Zdnet.

The most commonly used passwords in the data cache included "123456", "qwerty" and "password".

These are not good passwords, says Mashable. "An analogy to using these would be locking your front door, but then leaving keys on your porch. And breaking the lock. And punching a big hole in the door."

However, nearly 150,000 of the passwords contained more than 30 characters, which means that the strength of a password "is irrelevant" if the user has been infected with the malware, says LeakedSource. Turning on two-factor authentication will help keep an account more secure.

Based on the emails provided, many of the affected users appear to be from Russia. The site says it has verified the authenticity of the passwords with 15 users, all of whom confirmed they were genuine.

But some experts have expressed scepticism about the authenticity of the data, Tech Crunch reports.

"They may well be old leaks if they're consistent with the other big ones we've seen and simply haven't seen the light of day yet," said Troy Hunt, the creator of a site called haveibeenpwned.com, which catalogues breaches.