On December 23, 2022, a threat actor posted a post on a dark web forum claiming to have successfully exploited a vulnerability to grab data of over 400 million Twitter users and sell it online.

In order to prove the authenticity of the data, heShared some sample data of celebrities who are said to belong to different countries and professions. Sample data includes information such as: email, name, username, number of followers, date created; and even, in some cases, the user’s phone number. The sample shared directly in the post included the personal data of 37 people, and links to the data of another 1,000 users were also shared.

at the same timeAs a blackmail tactic,The threat actor also made calls to Twitter and Musk; suggesting a middleman deal,Buy this stolen data exclusively to avoid GDPR fines and loss of user trust.He also cited the previous Example of Facebook being fined for a data breach: In April 2021, a hacker exploited a bug to steal the data of 533 million Facebook users. On November 28, 2022, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, was fined €235 million (Approximately 2 billion RMB) fine.

“Your best option is to buy this data exclusively… Afterwards I will delete this thread and will not sell this data to anyone else. This will prevent many celebrities and politicians from being phished, crypto scammed, sim swapping, Doxxing And other things that will make your users lose trust in your company, thereby hindering your current growth and hype. You can also imagine famous content creators and influencers being hacked on twitter, which would definitely make them abandon the platform and ruin your dream of building a twitter video sharing platform for content creators; also because You made the mistake of changing Twitter policy and got a huge backlash.

If you’re not sure, vote on Twitter as usual, people choose their fate. Because at the end of the day, it’s the company’s fault that this data was leaked. “

According to Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of Israeli cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, “It is increasingly likely that this data is valid, possibly obtained from an API vulnerability that allowed threat actors to query Any email/phone calls and retrieved Twitter profiles. This is very similar to the 533 million Facebook data breach I originally reported in 2021, which resulted in a $275 million fine from Meta.”