January 5, 2023
According to Bleeping Computer, the hottest new Twitter controversy is a data leak comprising email addresses for over 200 million Twitter users that was published on a popular hacker forum for about $2.
The records were most likely compiled in late 2021, taking advantage of a vulnerability in Twitter’s system which allows users to enter email addresses and phone numbers to see if they were associated with a Twitter ID. These searches could be automated to check an infinite number of emails or phone numbers. This data set is said to be the same as the 400 million set that circulated in November, but it has been cleaned up to remove duplicates, bringing the total to around 221,608,279 lines.
The threat actors scraped public Twitter data for the ID and combined it with private email addresses/phone numbers to create profiles of Twitter users. Despite the fact that Twitter fixed this flaw in January 2022, multiple threat actors have recently begun to leak the data sets they collected for free over a year ago.
Twitter stated in August that it discovered the vulnerability in January 2022 through its bug bounty program, and that it was accidentally introduced in a code update seven months prior.
According to security experts, the leak presents a serious challenge of exposure, arrest, or retaliation against individuals who used Twitter to condemn governments or influential people, and it may expose others to extortion. Hackers could also use the email addresses to try to reset passwords and take control of accounts, particularly those without two-factor authentication.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.
