Twitter responded to the allegations that 200 million user data were obtained and sold online, stating that there is no evidence that the company had a recent major data breach.
It started a month ago, and then Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cybersecurity-monitoring firm Hudson Rock, claimed it was legit and wrote on LinkedIn that it “will, unfortunately, lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing and doxxing,” and he called it “one of the most significant leaks I’ve seen.”
Then it recently got more popular when Troy Hunt, founder of breach reporting service Have I Been Pwned, analyzed the exposed data and tweeted that it appeared to be “pretty much what it’s been described as.”
Many people may have been worried about the data leak, but Twitter has broken its silence and tweeted that all allegations are false and that there is no major proof of a recent data breach on their system:
It was suspected that hackers had simply gathered data from past breaches and made it appear new. It also revealed that the information being circulated is the account credentials of 5.4 million Twitter users, including email addresses and phone numbers, which were obtained from prior data breaches that Twitter has already fixed.
“Both datasets were the same, though the second one had the duplicated entries removed,” the company adds. “None of the datasets analyzed contained passwords or information that could lead to passwords being compromised.”
The researcher who said that the data was legitimate has yet to respond to Twitter’s recent statement that the data leak was a hoax.
