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More than 200 million Twitter accounts hacked and posted online

By Nithya Bose in Twitter/X News, posted January 6, 2023

Security researchers have found more than 200 million Twitter accounts were hacked and posted on an online hacking forum.

The data leak could reveal the true identities of anonymous Twitter users, making it easier for criminals to take over Twitter accounts or even victims' accounts on other sites.

The data dump also contains Twitter users' names, account handles, follower counts, and the dates their accounts were created.

Rafi Mendelsohn, a spokesman for Cyabra, a social media analysis firm said: “Bad actors have won the jackpot.

“Previously private data such as emails, handles, and creation date can be leveraged to build smarter and more sophisticated hacking, phishing and disinformation campaigns.”

Some reports suggested the data was gathered in 2021 as a result of a fault in Twitter's systems.

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The firm fixed the bug in 2022 after a subsequent incident in July involving 5.4 million Twitter accounts notified the firm of the vulnerability.

Troy Hunt, a security researcher, said his examination of the data “found 211,524,284 unique email addresses” that had been leaked.

Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Source: CNN

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