Back in December, rumors about a Twitter breach caused uncertainty among users. The fear of 400 million personal user data like emails and phone numbers linked to Twitter being leaked was not an ideal scenario. Now, according to reports, the private information of a whopping 200 million users’ data was leaked.
The Twitter data acquired by the ill-doer was posted on a popular hacker forum. The leaked data includes account name/handle, follower count, date of creation as well as email addresses. The database that is found on the website is 63GB. However, this was reduced to 4GB after duplicates were kicked out and files were compressed. This data was put up for sale and could be downloaded for eight credits.
Data of prominent Twitter accounts like Sundar Pichai, SpaceX, Donald Trump Jr., CBS Media, WHO, and NBA were reportedly leaked.
In this instance, eliminating duplicates led to the 200 million figure which is far from the estimated 400 million. There are no phone numbers in the publicly available data collection. The researchers issued a warning that social engineering or doxing operations might get started using these data sets.
Twitter breach: Where it all began
This leak dates back to July 2022. Back in July, a hacker leaked the data of 5.4 million Twitter users. Twitter later announced that the problem was fixed. However, in December 2022, a data leak associated with the platform surfaced once again.
The hacker demanded $279 million from Elon Musk, the company’s current CEO, in order to secure the stolen data. If the CEO of Twitter didn’t take action, the hacker would give the information away. Musk was also informed by the hacker of the potential consequences of a data release. Phishing, cryptocurrency fraud, sim swapping, and the doxing of both common people and celebrities were all included.