Twitter is again hit by a data leak case. This time the data containing email addresses belonging to 200 million Twitter users was leaked and sold on the hacker forum Breached for USD 2 .
According to the BleepingComputer report, the information that was leaked included email addresses, names, usernames, number of followers, and account creation dates. The data was released in the form of a RAR archive containing five text files totaling 59GB of data.
This data set is claimed to be the same as the 400 million leaked data that was sold on hacker forums last November for USD 200,000, but cleaned so that it does not contain duplicates. After deducting duplicates, the total leaked data is 221,608,279.
BleepingComputer said it was able to confirm that the email addresses listed in that database matched existing Twitter profiles. But they can only confirm part and not the whole data set.
"Furthermore, this data set is far from complete because many users were not found in the leak. Whether or not your information is in this data set depends very much on whether your email address was exposed in previous data leaks," BleepingComputer said, as quoted by us. , Friday (6/1/2023).
Cybersecurity expert Alon Gal from Hudson Rock said the data leak was significant. He said this data leak has the potential to make Twitter users vulnerable to being the target of hacking, phishing and doxxing.
Since July 22, 2022, hackers and collectors of stolen data have been busy selling and distributing Twitter user data sets that contain personal and private information. This data is taken using scraping techniques by exploiting security holes in the Twitter API.
The security flaw allowed users to enter email addresses and phone numbers to ensure the information was linked to a Twitter account. The hacker then uses another API to scrape public Twitter data and combines the public data with email addresses or phone numbers to create profiles of Twitter users.