Twitter is in a frenzy over another embarrassing scandal, but this time it’s not Elon Musk.
During the holidays, things quieted down a bit around the house of Twitter, where previously for months the big dust-up cases followed one another due to the actions of the new owner Elon Musk, such as axed introduction of paid authenticationobsession banning journalists who upset the billionaire. As the start of the new year, the social media site has once again entered the news in a negative light, but this time the responsibility does not lie with Elon Musk.
In the past few days, it has been revealed that even under the previous leadership, at the end of 2021, due to a vulnerability, the e-mail addresses, usernames and phone numbers of more than 200 million Twitter users could have been leaked, if the person in question also entered the latter data on the site.
Security expert Troy Hunt talks about 218 million exposed accounts, the The Washington Post sources on the other hand They mention 235 million.
Found 211,524,284 unique email addresses, looks to be pretty much what it’s been described as
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) January 5, 2023
Either way, the leak is sure to affect a lot of people, and the data has been sold on the dark web for some time. Through stolen information, malicious actors can, among other things, discover the identity of anonymous users, or they can use the file for more effective phishing attacks, even attacking non-Twitter accounts in possession of names and e-mail addresses.
For those wondering if they are affected by the leak, hosted by Troy Hunt On a portal called Have I Been Pwned you can check whether your e-mail address is in the database or in one of the previously published files.