"I've seen lists like these before," he continued, "and, without exception, fragments of this list are what I'd expect from a collection of phished passwords sewn together into a larger list, freshened up a bit to obscure their antiquity, and presented as something new and newsworthy."

According to a Twitter spokesperson, the company is pushing password resets to affected accounts. Meanwhile, the microblogging service is searching for answers about who leaked the account information and why they did it.

It is ironic that so many of the accounts apparently belong to spammers, since Twitter trumpeted its efforts to combat spam on the service by filing a lawsuit against five of the most aggressive spammers and spam tool makers targeting the microblogging site.

How the account information was obtained by the data thief is also important to Twitter, since it is operating under an agreement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to protect its members' privacy. That agreement was last year and stemmed from two hacking attacks on the service in 2009 where some high profile Twitter members, including President Obama, lost control of their accounts.

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