At the beginning of 2022, a flaw in the Twitter API had allowed hackers to recover the data of 5.4 million members of the social network. These consisted of Twitter IDs, names and nicknames and other user statuses. While most of this information is publicly available, others such as email addresses and phone numbers were not meant to be disclosed.
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This type of information is worth a small fortune, hackers hastened to put it up for sale for the modest sum of 30,000 dollars. That said, doubt remained as to the use of this little war chest. Since the beginning of the year, Twitter has experienced so many adventures that its CEO Elon Musk has raised the possibility of putting the company into bankruptcy. Enough to forget this data leak, indeed. Twitter members now have a very good reason to worry about their security: according to Bleeping Computer, their personal data has been shared on a hacker site. According to the source of the site, only a restricted group of hackers would have had access to all this data.
Twitter leaked data from over 7 million accounts, watch out for phishing
The initial data leak also included the private information of 1.4 million suspended accounts by the platform. In the batch, there is probably the data of Donald Trump, who has since been reinstated on the platform. According to the experts, many more accounts would have been exposed through this flaw. The number of potential victims of this mass hacking could amount to 17 million.
Ironically, it is on Mastodon, the social network which is gaining more and more members thanks to the setbacks of Twitter, that specialists communicate the security breach which affects Elon Musk’s social network. One of them, Chad Loder, shared a sample of the data that leaked on the web. So much information that could be used to conduct phishing campaigns or even worse, which could be used to discover the true identity behind certain accounts.
Source: Bleeping Computer