Recently, the threat actor, "Ryushi", allegedly reported having stolen data from Twitter, including details of some famous celebrities worldwide. He is demanding $200,000 (£166,000) to hand over the data back.
According to the data, the hacker stole email addresses, and phone numbers belonging to celebrities and politicians, however, the size of the hack has not been confirmed yet.
The UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) reported, "We are engaged in dialogue with Twitter's data protection officer and will be making inquiries on this matter. The firm is also
Co-operating with the Data Protection Commission of Ireland”.
Following the appearance of the news, Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) reported that “the agency will examine Twitter's compliance with data protection law in relation to that security issue". However, Twitter did not make any public statement about the hack.
As per the Guardian, the data of US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was included in the sample of data that was made public by the hacker. Also, the Twitter handle of broadcaster Piers Morgan was recently hacked and is also reported to be included in the sample.
Only 60 emails out of the sample of 1,000 have been provided by the threat actor in the earlier incident, "so we are confident that this breach is different and significantly bigger", said the firm's chief technology officer, Alon Gal. "The hacker aims to sell the database through an escrow service that is offered on a cyber-crime forum. Typically this is only done for real offerings."
The threat actor is well aware of how damaging data loss can be for platforms. The hacker in the online post demanding money for the stolen data, also warns Twitter that it is the best chance of avoiding a large data-protection hack.
"The DPC has engaged with Twitter in this inquiry and will examine Twitter's compliance with data protection law in relation to that security issue," DPC further said.
