Twitter data breach: Data of 200 million users leaked online

Hackers stole the email addresses of more than 200 million Twitter users and posted them on an online hacking forum, a security researcher said Wednesday. The breach “will unfortunately lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing and doxxing,” Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cybersecurity-monitoring firm Hudson Rock, wrote on LinkedIn. He called it “one of the most significant leaks I’ve seen.”

Twitter database leaks for free with 235,000,000 records.

The database contains 235,000,000 unique records of Twitter users and their email addresses and will unfortunately lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing, and doxxing.

This is one of the most significant leaks ever. pic.twitter.com/kxRY605qMZ

— Hudson Rock (@RockHudsonRock) January 4, 2023

Twitter data breach

AI-based cyber-security firm CloudSEK also revealed that the stolen data includes email address, name, screen name/username, account creation date and follower count.

Twitter has not commented on the report, which Gal first posted about on social media on December 24, nor responded to inquiries about the breach since that date. It was not clear what action, if any, Twitter has taken to investigate or remediate the issue.

Reuters could not independently verify the data on the forum was authentic and came from Twitter. Screenshots of the hacker forum, where the data appeared on Wednesday, have circulated online.

However, the platform shared methods of regaining control over accounts, in incase they have been compromised.

If you can’t log in, your account may have been compromised. Request a password reset as a first step: https://t.co/t0DroWfH2G

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 5, 2023

Troy Hunt, creator of breach-notification site Have I Been Pwned, viewed the leaked data and said on Twitter that it seemed “pretty much what it’s been described as.”

Dammit! Oddly enough, this old email address of mine only appeared as someone put it in as the *name* of their account years ago and it got picked up by the regex I used to parse the data. Weird. pic.twitter.com/WMoTNGKTvY

— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) January 6, 2023

There were no clues to the identity or location of the hacker or hackers behind the breach. It may have taken place as early as 2021, which was before Elon Musk took over ownership of the company last year.

Claims about the size and scope of the breach initially varied, with early accounts in December saying 400 million email addresses and phone numbers were stolen.

A major breach at Twitter may interest regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. The Data Protection Commission in Ireland, where Twitter has its European headquarters, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission have been monitoring the Elon Musk-owned company for compliance with European data protection rules and a U.S. consent order respectively.

Messages left with the two regulators were not immediately returned on Thursday.

–With inputs from Reuters

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