London: Hackers have stolen the e-mail addresses of more than 200 million Twitter users and posted them on an online hacking forum, a security researcher said on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
“Unfortunately, this flaw will lead to a lot of hacking and fraud,” Alon Gal, co-founder of the Israeli cyber security-monitoring institute Hudson’s Rock, wrote on LinkedIn. In my view, this is a catastrophic data leak.
Twitter did not comment on the Gal post report on social media on December 24, and did not even raise the issue of an investigation into the error. It is not clear whether Twitter has taken any steps to remedy this.
The leaked data was circulated on the same hacker forum on Wednesday. Some of his screenshots are currently circulating online.
There is no way to identify the hackers involved or their location. This incident may have happened in early 2021. In December, it was estimated that 400 million e-mail addresses and phone numbers had been stolen.