Twitter has denied the data hack that affected 200 million users. The microblogging platform has said that it found no evidence that the data being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems adding that the data is likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources.
“200 million dataset could not be correlated with the previously reported incident or any data originating from an exploitation of Twitter systems,” company wrote in a blog post.
Cybersecurity expert Alon Gal last week claimed that private data of over 200 million Twitter users were stolen and posted on an online hacker forum. He claimed that the breach could subsequently lead to other online crimes like hacking, doxxing and targeted phishing. He called it one of the significant leaks that he’s ever seen. While these datasets do not contain passwords but the email addresses can alone be used for targeting specific accounts.
Now responding to these claims, Twitter says that there no evidence that proves the leaked datasets were obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems.
“We take our responsibility to protect your privacy very seriously. In response to recent media reports of Twitter users’ data being sold online, we conducted a thorough investigation and there is no evidence that data recently being sold was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems. We also want to share an update about an incident that took place earlier this year, and provide transparency into the steps we took to remediate it,” said Twitter.
Twitter claims to have conducted a comprehensive investigation and here is what its Incident Response and Privacy and Data Protection teams finally found:
— 5.4 million user accounts reported in November were found to be the same as those exposed in August 2022.
— 400 million instances of user data in the second alleged breach could not be correlated with the previously reported incident, nor with any new incident.
— 200 million dataset could not be correlated with the previously reported incident or any data originating from an exploitation of Twitter systems.
— Both datasets were the same, though the second one had the duplicated entries removed.
— None of the datasets analyzed contained passwords or information that could lead to passwords being compromised.
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