Twitter has denied the claim of getting hacked and the stolen data being sold online.
According to a LinkedIn post last week by Alon Gal, co-founder of the Israeli cybersecurity monitoring company Hudson Rock, stolen data has been discovered, that contained email addresses of more than 200 million twitter users.
The breach would probably result in "hacking, targeted phishing, and doxxing," according to Gal, who labeled it as a "significant leak" and said that the information had been uploaded on an internet hacker forum.
He claimed that despite alerting the firm, Twitter, he had not received a response.
"I urge security researchers to conduct a thorough examination of the leaked data and rule out Twitter's conclusion of the data being an enrichment of some sort which did not originate from their own servers," says Alon Gal.
Although, Twitter has denied all claims of the emails, allegedly linked to the users’ accounts, being obtained through a hack.
In regards to the issue Twitter responded by stating “in response to recent media reports of Twitter users’ data being sold online, we conducted a thorough investigation and there is no evidence that data recently being sold was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems.”
According to Twitter, the stolen records in question was instead probably a collection of data “already publicly available online.” While it still warns online users to be wary of suspicious emails.
Gal, meanwhile, disapproved of Twitter's answer in a fresh post on LinkedIn. In contrast to instances of data enrichments, he noted, “The authenticity of the leak is evident in the lack of false positives between Twitter usernames and emails found in the database, opposite to cases of data enrichments.”
The disclosure came to light following the multiple reports that Twitter data of millions of users – 5.4 million in November 2022, 400 million in December 2022, and 200 million last week – have been exposed online for sale on cybercrime forums.
The Breach Could Not Be Correlated to Previous or New Incidents
Twitter, in its latest post says that the latest dataset breach of 200 million users “could not be correlated with the previously reported incident, nor with any new incident or any data originating from an exploitation of Twitter systems.”
It added that, “None of the datasets analyzed contained passwords or information that could lead to passwords being compromised.”
Moreover, in December 2022, another set of reports claimed that 400 million email addresses and phone numbers were stolen from Twitter – which the company denied as well.