Twitter has been in an uproar since Tesla CEO Elon Musk took control of the social media platform in October in a deal worth US$44 billion (around Rs.3.64 billion). Mass layoffs at the company, major policy changes, and concerns about platform regulation followed. Now, Twitter might face a massive data breach that could threaten users’ private information. According to a report, data from 40 million Twitter users, including prominent public figures such as American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, has been put up for sale. In addition, the person behind the breach is also reportedly trying to blackmail Twitter CEO Elon Musk into buying the data.
According to cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, the first sighted The breach, over 40 million people’s private data was obtained by a “threat actor” and is now up for sale. The database contains sensitive information such as emails and phone numbers.
In its tweets, the company stated that the person responsible for the breach is “credible” and claims to have obtained the data by exploiting a vulnerability in early 2022 Twitter. The threat actor has also provided a sample of the data, which reveals private information from high-profile individuals such as Donald Trump Jr., Sundar Pichai, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Hudson Rock released a screenshot of the hacker’s post on the data breach published on December 23. The person appears to be blackmailing the CEO of Twitter Elon Musk above the leak. “Twitter or Elon Musk, if you are reading this, you are already risking a GDPR fine of 5.4 million violations if you imagine the fine of 400 million users. Your best option to avoid paying $276 million in fines for GDPR violations, like Facebook did (due to 533 million users scraped), is to buy that data exclusively.”
The threat actor’s claims are yet to be verified, but Hudson Rock said the breached data appears to be legitimate.
This isn’t the first data breach Twitter has faced. In August, Twitter data from 5.4 million users was offered for sale online. Twitter had Confirmed that the impact of the breach was global. Last week Meta I Agree Paying US$725 million (around Rs.6,000 crore) to settle a class action lawsuit accusing the company of allowing third parties to access users’ personal information.
