One of the biggest Twitter data breaches has resulted in the selling of 400 million Twitter users' personal information on the dark web. The news was released just one day after the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) said that it was looking into a prior Twitter data leak that affected more than 5.4 million users, according to CyberExpress.
In late November, the previous breach was discovered.
The hacker released a sample of the data on one of the hacker sites as evidence that the data is real. Email, username, follower count, creation date, and, in some situations, the users' phone numbers are all included in the sample data.
What's shocking is that the hacker's sample data includes information from some pretty well-known user accounts. The user data in the sample data includes the following:
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
- SpaceX
- CBS Media
- Donald Trump Jr.
- Doja Cat
- Charlie Puth
- Sundar Pichai
- Salman Khan
- NASA's JWST account
- NBA
- Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, India
- Shawn Mendes
- Social Media of WHO
The sample data includes the data of many more well-known users. The majority of them will point to the social media staff, but if the data leak is real, it will be disastrous. While other threat actors have not verified the data yet, Alon Gal in his LinkedIn post states that "The data is increasingly more likely to be valid and was probably obtained from an API vulnerability enabling the threat actor to query any email / phone and retrieve a Twitter profile, this is extremely similar to the Facebook 533m database that I originally reported about in 2021 and resulted in a $275,000,000 fine to Meta."
Meanwhile, In his post, the hacker writes, "Twitter or Elon Musk if you are reading this you are already risking a GDPR fine over 5.4m breach imagine the fine of 400m users breach source. Your best option to avoid paying $276 million USD in GDPR breach fines like Facebook did (due to 533m users being scraped) is to buy this data exclusively."
The hacker states he is open to the 'Deal' going through a middle man and further stated, "After that I will delete this thread and will not sell this data again. And data will not be sold to anyone else which will prevent a lot of celebrities and politicians from Phishing, Crypto scams, Sim swapping, Doxxing and other things that will make your users Lose trust in you as a company and thus stunt the current growth and hype that you are having also just imagine famous content creators and influencers getting hacked on twitter that will for sure Make them ghost the platform and ruin your dream of twitter video sharing platform for content creators, also since you Made the mistake of changing twitter policy that got an immense backlash."
