Data of 400 million Twitter users, including prominent public figures like American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Google CEO Mr. Sundar Pichai, has been put up for sale by a hacker, according to a report.
According to cybersecurity company Hudson Rock, which first spotted the breach, the private data of over 400 million individuals has been obtained by a “threat actor” and is now up for sale. The database includes sensitive information like emails and phone numbers.
In the tweets, the firm explained that the individual responsible for the breach is “credible” and claims to have procured the data in early 2022 by exploiting a vulnerability in Twitter. The threat actor has also provided a sample of the data, revealing private information of high-profile individuals.
The individual appears to be extorting Twitter CEO Mr. Elon Musk over the leak. “Twitter or Elon Musk if you are reading this you are already risking a GDPR fine over 5.4 million breach imaging the fine of 400 million users breach source. Your best option to avoid paying $276 million in GDPR breach fines like Facebook did, due to which 533 million users are being scraped, is to buy this data exclusively,” the hacker said.
The individual goes on by giving a threatening message to Mr. Musk that “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 a Twitter video sharing platform for content creators, also since you made the mistake of changing twitter policy that got an immense backlash.”
The claims of the threat actor are not yet verified, but Hudson Rock said that the breached data seems to be legitimate.
