On December 23rd an anonymous hacker uploaded a dataset of leaked email addresses and phone numbers of Twitter users, among which, supposedly, were public figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump Jr., Sundar Pichai, and others. In exchange for a “exclusive” sale of the data, the hacker requested US$200,000. Alon Gal of the cybercrime information company Hudson Rock claims that the breach included more than 200 million email addresses and it was significant in terms of potential harm that could be caused by cyber-terrorists.
Twitter has yet not made any comments on the recent breach in its data. According to company’s statements, they knew about the vulnerability in their cybersecurity since January 2022. According to the person who posted the data, they obtained the records in 2021 by utilizing data-scraping techniques through a vulnerability that Twitter revealed in August 2022 and has since been patched.
Despite negative comments concerning Elon Musk’s job as the CEO of Twitter, the U.S. regulators have also been watching developments at the company since Musk took over. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done in order to make the Twitter users data safe and prevent such leaks in the future.
This story once again tells us that our data is not completely safe on the Internet and social media and one needs to be careful on how they surf the big web. Personally, I believe that the government and NGOs need to push harder on big tech companies when it comes to securing its users data. Stronger legislations and scrutiny will provide a safer space for social media users and create a better environment where we can coexist.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/05/twitters-latest-hack-is-big-one/
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64153381
https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-leak-200-million-user-email-addresses/
Nowadays, global corporations store all our private data, which we provide ourselves. Despite the fact that GDPR forbids using it in any way, our private data still needs to be stored somewhere, and due to the fact that cybersecurity always goes along with hacking, our data will never be completely secure.
I think it makes no sense to store very important data in the internet, because you can never be sure it will not be leaked out. Completely agree with the comment above.