Twitter has locked a number of accounts that may have been affected by internet security breaches, the social networking site says.
"A number of Twitter accounts were identified for extra protection.
"Accounts with direct password exposure were locked and require a password reset by the account owner," Twitter security manager Michael Coates said in a blog post on Friday.
Without mentioning the number of accounts affected, Coates maintained that any leaked data had not been taken from Twitter's computer servers, but rather had been arrived at by breaches at other sites and/or private computers.
The statement follows an earlier report that nearly 33 million Twitter accounts had been stolen and offered for sale.
The report from IT news site TechCrunch stated that the leaked information included email addresses, usernames and passwords.
The TechCrunch source also indicated that the data may have been obtained from hacks of web browsers, adding that many of the affected users appeared to have been in Russia.
Twitter and other security experts in response warned users of using the same password for various online services.
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