WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Twitter is reportedly facing its biggest data breach in the recent times. A report by Israeli cyber intelligence company Hudson Rock said that a hacker has claimed to having accessed data of 40 crore Twitter users and put them for sale on the dark web. The stolen data includes that of high-profile people like Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, India and Bollywood actor Salman Khan among others.
According to the Hudson Rock report, the personal data includes email, username, followers and even phone numbers. The hacker's post read, 'I am selling data of +400 million unique Twitter users that was scrapped via a vulnerability, this data is completely private.'
It is to be noted that it was only a few months ago, the social media platform had faced the data leak of over 5.4 million users. The Irish Data Protection Commission is still looking into the previous leak.
The hacker has reportedly also offered a deal to Twitter CEO Elon Musk by stating, 'Twitter or Elon Musk, if you are reading this post, you are already at risk of GDPR fines for the data leak of over 54 million users. Now fines for data leak of 400 million users. Your best option to avoid paying $2.76 million in CDPR breach fines like Facebook did (due to 533 million users being scraped) is to buy this data exclusively.'
The Hudson Rock report cited API vulnerability of the micro-blogging site as a factor why the data was accessible to the hacker. Alon Gal, co-Founder and CTO of Hudson Rock, wrote on LinkedIn, 'The data is increasingly more likely to be valid and was probably obtained from an API vulnerability enabling the threat actor to query any email / phone and retrieve a Twitter profile, this is extremely similar to the Facebook 533m database that I originally reported about in 2021 and resulted in a $275,000,000 fine to Meta.'
According to the report, the hacker has agreed to a 'deal' with a middleman also. The hacker reportedly said, 'After that I will delete this thread and will not sell this data again. And data will not be sold to anyone else which will prevent a lot of celebrities and politicians from Phishing, Crypto scams, Sim swapping, Doxxing and other things that will make your users Lose trust in you as a company and thus stunt the current growth and hype that you are having also just imagine famous content creators and influencers getting hacked on twitter that will for sure Make them ghost the platform and ruin your dream of twitter video sharing platform for content creators, also since you Made the mistake of changing twitter policy that got an immense backlash.'
The data breach has not been confirmed by Twitter or Elon Musk.
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