A Twitter API vulnerability patched in January 2022 was widely exploited by threat actors before the fix, with one having shared the private information of 7 million users on a hacker forum.<\/p>\n
According to Bleeping Computer<\/a><\/strong>, a security researcher has disclosed another, possibly more significant, data dump of millions of Twitter records containing non-public information, including phone numbers and email addresses.<\/p>\n In July 2022, a malicious actor started trying to sell the 7 million Twitter users’ private information \u2014 which they obtained by exploiting the API vulnerability \u2014 on the Breached hacking forum.<\/p>\n The flaw allowed malicious actors to enter phone numbers and email addresses into the API to get associated Twitter IDs, which they could then use to scrape further information.<\/p>\n Twitter confirmed that it had suffered a data breach after it saw a sample of the stolen user records. It said it had patched the vulnerability in January 2022.<\/p>\n Pompompurin, the owner of the Breached hacking forum, told BleepingComputer that the group was responsible for exploiting the flaw and creating the massive dump of Twitter user records.<\/p>\n The data includes private information from 1.4 million suspended accounts and 5.4 million active profiles, bringing the total number of profiles in the data dump to nearly 7 million.<\/p>\n The records are now being shared for free on a hacking forum.<\/p>\n Security researcher Chad Loder disclosed another, even larger data breach on Twitter on Wednesday, 23 November.<\/p>\n While the data includes similar information, the breach is far more widespread, affecting all Twitter accounts that have the “Let others find you by your phone” discoverability feature enabled.<\/p>\n “I have just received evidence of a massive Twitter data breach affecting millions of Twitter accounts in EU and US,” Loder’s post read<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n “I have contacted a sample of the affected accounts and they confirmed that the breached data is accurate. This breach occurred no earlier than 2021.”<\/p>\n Loder’s account was suspended soon after disclosing the data breach on Twitter. It is unclear why his account was suspended, with Twitter stating that it suspends accounts that violate its rules.<\/p>\n Left-wing commentators are suggesting that Elon Musk has a conservative bias, and that Loder’s activism<\/a><\/strong> got his account banned. However, some right-wing commentators insinuate that Loder’s association with convicted sex criminals was the reason.<\/p>\n Twitter patched the vulnerability in January 2022, but not before threat actors widely exploited it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341076,"featured_media":471573,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,27],"tags":[80068,26872,405],"class_list":["post-471569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","category-security","tag-breached-forums","tag-data-breach","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471569"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341076"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":471611,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471569\/revisions\/471611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNow read: Twitter is hiring<\/a><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"