Nothing is going well for the social network Twitter. After its catastrophic takeover by Elon Musk, the platform fell victim to a major hack where nearly 200 million users saw their data harvested and resold online. The hacker demands $200,000 from Twitter, which refuses to acknowledge the situation.
Data supposed to contain the email addresses of over 200 million users of Twitter just got picked up by a hacker. The stolen information includes email addresses and phone numbers used to create accounts.
Alon Gal of cybercrime reporting firm Hudson Rock who uncovered this massive data leak, the leak as significant. It should lead to many hacked accountstargeted by phishing and doxing (the fact of publishing personal information about a person that can lead to their identification).
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The pirate, Ryushi, today demands $200,000 from Twitter to remove them. The problem is that the data currently offered online (for free) has been published by another person. They are fortunately smaller in size and do not include telephone numbers.
On the web, several researchers have tried to analyze this data, in order to verify that they do not belong to bots. Many Twitter accounts appear multiple times or as duplicates, but the number of unique email addresses involved is still over 100 million.
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Twitter is supposed to be aware of this massive data leak, but so far the company (which has disbanded its communications teams since taking over Elon Musk) refused to acknowledge the situation.
Meanwhile, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) said it ” would review Twitter’s compliance with data protection law regarding the security issue “. Remember that Twitter is not the only company to bear the brunt of such attacks. Nearly 230 million Deezer users have seen their data sold online, as have 533,000 La Poste customers, and 500 million WhatsApp users.
