A user on a popular hacking forum has claimed to have scraped over 400 million ‘unique Twitter users’ in a massive breach.
Announcing the hack on Friday, December 23, Breached VC forum user Ryushi claims to be in possession of over 400 million Twitter users’ data. This breach includes a sample of data collected, including personal email addresses of US Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump Jr., and even content creators like GeorgeNotFound, Markiplier, and co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak.
The hacker is currently inviting Elon Musk and Twitter executives to enter into discussions, in a bid to ensure this data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. No numbers were supplied, but the precedent is Facebook’s GDPR fines from the European Union.
That breach included 533 million users having their data leaked, which cost the company $276 million.
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the law within Europe, that user data cannot be looked into, shared, or accessed without the express permission of the user themselves. This can boil down to sharing an email address between co-workers under certain conditions.
While Musk or Twitter have made no moves, the news has gone under the radar due to its closeness to the holiday season. Ryushi claims that the data was scraped through a vulnerability in Twitter’s infrastructure. Other than the light smattering of emails of politicians and celebrities, has not taken any of the data public.
Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on Esports, Gaming and more.
As serious as the data breach is for Twitter in its current struggles, the hacker doesn’t mention that the data includes passwords. What they do claim is that this data could be used in a variety of scams, such as phishing, sim swapping, and crypto scams.
The data is also liable to be used in doxxing attempts, however, the hacker seems more interested in warning Musk about his loss of trust in the platform.
Twitter is currently in a state of flux, as the new management continues to try to make a new path for the ailing platform. Musk has recently claimed the site would lose $3 billion if things were to continue as it currently stands and is publicly looking for an out as CEO.