A Twitter problems accumulate. The data of some 235 million users of the red socialincluding their emails, have been exposed this week in a popular forum of hackerswhere they are auctioned for about two dollars.
Apparently, the leak would have been detected by Alan Gal, co-founder of the Israeli security company Hudson Rock. “The database contains 235,000,000 unique records of Twitter users and their email addresses. email and unfortunately it will lead to a lot of attacks, phishing targeting and doxing,” he noted in a LinkedIn post.
Last July, the company now commanded by magnate Elon Musk suffered a cyber attack that exploded a security breach on the platform to steal and leak the data of 5.4 million users. Twitter then explained that it had detected that vulnerability in January 2022 and had quickly patched it, pointing out that no sensitive personal information had been compromised. He also assured that he would notify the owners of the affected accounts.
“Serious Threat”
Since last summer, hackers have been selling and circulating packets of stolen data of Twitter among which there would be both the email addresses and the telephone numbers of the users.
the platform of cybersecurity HackerOne warned that it was a “serious threat”, since the filtering of this data and its sale on web portals means that any actor can acquire it to try to later launch more precise cyberattacks against exposed Twitter users. Computer attacks ranging from identity theft to sending them messages with malicious links to infiltrate viruses into their operating systems, known as ‘phishing’.
The US media suggests that these data sets were created in 2021 taking advantage of flaws in safety from the Twitter API. The attackers tracked public user data and combined it with stolen private data to create user profiles.
In December, the Irish Data Protection Commission, the body regulator in charge of supervising the actions of Twitter in the European Unionsent a letter asking the company to provide information about this massive theft of data from millions of its users.