A hacker has uploaded a huge database of 200 million Twitter accounts to a forum. Many phishing and scam messages are expected to hit the social network following this leak.
Twitter’s big sellout of user data continues. On January 4, she dated a member of a famous forum by hackers sold the email addresses of 200 million accounts for just two dollars, the base price for unlocking files on this platform.
A sample of 100,000 identifiers is freely available to verify that the database is indeed legitimate. We can confirm that several email addresses are compliant.
The hacker uploaded a RAR archive consisting of six text files for a total size of 59GB of data. Each row represents a Twitter user and information about him: email addresses, names, aliases, number of followers and account creation dates. The database is already available on other forums.
While passwords aren’t included, that won’t stop many criminals from sending millions phishing messages or scams to trick users. Famous Twitter accounts were hacked last week, as English presenter Piers Morgan (8.3 million subscribers) Where is it Scottish actor Graham Mctavish (272,000 subscribers). We therefore advise you to be careful, especially with the messages you receive from the social network.
A serious breach of security
Twitter user data they have been on sale since this summer on many forums. In December 2021, the hacker had managed to exploit a flaw to extract data thanks to a bot that digs into the website – we speak of scraping to designate this method. A researcher alerted Twitter in January: “ The vulnerability allows any party to recover a Twitter ID by submitting a phone number/email even if the affected user has blocked this lookup in settings confidentiality “, describes the expert under the pseudonym Zhirinovskiy. The social network fixed the leak, but it was already too late. A file containing the data of 1.4 million French users it is also circulating among hackers.
In late December, a hacker claimed to have the information of 400 million accounts. This database would likely be the same as the one that went on sale this January 4th. In Ireland, where Twitter is based in Europe, the Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced on 23 Decemberto have launched an investigation into the group for this lack of protection of user data.
