A database containing over 235 million unique records of Twitter users is now available for free on the web, cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock warns.

Containing information such as name, username, email address, follower count, and creation date, the database has been circulating on underground forums and was eventually leaked for free.

“The database contains 235 [million] unique records of Twitter users and their email addresses and will unfortunately lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing, and doxxing,” Hudson Rock co-founder and CTO Alon Gal says.

The information in the database, however, appears to have been gathered via web-scraping rather than by hacking into Twitter’s systems.

Moreover, HCI & Data Cloud’s Ron Scott-Adams also points out that the data seems to be at least two years-old, and that it consists mainly of publicly available information, except for the email addresses.

Last year, Twitter confirmed that a vulnerability introduced in 2021 allowed hackers to obtain the information of millions of users. The issue allowed attackers to discover whether a phone number or email address was tied to a Twitter account.

In August 2022, a database containing the information of 5.4 million Twitter users started being offered for sale on hacker forums, for $30,000.

In November, cybersecurity expert Chad Loder said that he obtained a database containing the exfiltrated information of a larger number of Twitter users.

Several weeks later, Twitter responded to the claim, saying that “the exposed data was the same in both cases”, but refrained from sharing details on the exact number of impacted users.

In December, an individual offered for sale the information of over 400 million Twitter users, including names, usernames, email addresses, phone numbers and follower counts.

By Ionut Arghire on Thu, 05 Jan 2023 11:17:17 +0000
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