(ANSA) - MILAN, JAN 09 - The usernames and e-mail addresses belonging to more than 200 million Twitter subscribers have been put up for sale online by hackers.
As reported by the Bleeping Computer website, the credentials are the result of a series of breaches on the social network dating back to 2021 and disclosed last August.
The offer of the complete archive is instead recent and was discovered by researchers from the Hudson Rock company.
Although the database does not include passwords, it still poses a security threat to users.
"This is one of the most significant leaks I've ever seen," Hudson Rock co-founder Alon Gal told The Verge.
Estimates of the exact number of users affected by the breach vary, partly due to the tendency of such archives to include duplicate data.
The screenshots shared by Bleeping Computer show a series of text files with email addresses and usernames, as well as users' real names (if reported on Twitter), their follower counts, and account creation dates.
The site writes that it has "confirmed the validity of many of the email addresses listed in the leak" and that the database is being sold on a hacking forum for just $2.
The breach has been added to the systems "Have I BeenPwned" platform, which allows anyone to enter their email address to check which of the associated services is included in security incidents.
Twitter revealed the vulnerability that allowed hackers to obtain the archive of more than 200 million subscribers in August 2022, claiming to have fixed it in January of the same year.
The company, at the time, said it had no evidence to suggest anyone had taken advantage of the problem.
At the end of 2022, a hacker called "Ryushi" claimed in a post on the Breached forum that he had come into possession of the data of 400 million Twitter users, asking the owner of the social network, Elon Musk, the sum of $ 200,000 to prevent them from being sold.
In that case,
it was a mix of public and private data, obtained in 2021 by exploiting a flaw in Twitter's programming code.
To better defend himself against such problems, Musk had hired George "Geohot" Hotz, a world-famous hacker who was responsible for unlocking the first iPhones of the PlayStations.
Within weeks of starting his stint on Musk's court, Hotz stepped down from the position by tweeting, "I appreciate the opportunity, but didn't think there would be any real impact in what I was doing. Also, it was sad to see my GitHub (platform for developers , ed.) Let's go back to coding".
Musk himself had hired George "Geohot" Hotz, a world-famous hacker who was responsible for unlocking the first iPhones of the PlayStations.
Within weeks of starting his stint on Musk's court, Hotz stepped down from the position by tweeting, "I appreciate the opportunity, but didn't think there would be any real impact in what I was doing. Also, it was sad to see my GitHub (platform for developers , ed.) Let's go back to coding".
Musk himself had hired George "Geohot" Hotz, a world-famous hacker who was responsible for unlocking the first iPhones of the PlayStations.
Within weeks of starting his stint on Musk's court, Hotz stepped down from the position by tweeting, "I appreciate the opportunity, but didn't think there would be any real impact in what I was doing. Also, it was sad to see my GitHub (platform for developers , ed.) Let's go back to coding".
it was sad to see my GitHub wither.
Let's go back to coding."
it was sad to see my GitHub wither.
Let's go back to coding."
(HANDLE).