After having identified a crafty ploy that attempted to steal usernames and passwords by creating fake BitTorrent sites, micro-blogging service Twitter has urged some of its users to update their passwords.

In its late Tuesday notice to developers, Twitter revealed that an anonymous person had been creating the so-called “torrent” sites and forums for “a number of years,” chiefly for seeking usernames and passwords and consequently gaining access to Twitter accounts.

Twitter also said that it had reset passwords on a number of user accounts, and later, in a blog post, elaborated its password-change mechanism.

Noting that the phishing attempt was a rather unique one, Del Harvey, Twitter’s director of Trust ansD Safety, said: “As part of our ongoing efforts to monitor our user base for odd activity, we noticed a sudden surge in followers for a couple accounts in the last five days. Given the circumstances surrounding this, we felt it was best to push out a password reset to accounts that were following these suspicious users.”

Though Twitter admitted that it had neither identified all of the dummy forums nor can it practically do so, because of lack of connection with them; it has advised the users that, as a general rule, if they sign up for a third party torrent forum or torrent site, they should preferably change their passwords for that site.