Of the many things that Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk is currently dealing with, a new and seemingly the biggest one has just cropped up. A hacker going by the name Ryushi has claimed to hack personal data of over 400 million Twitter users. The hacker has posted a sample of data as proof which includes names like Donald Trump Jr., Steve Wozniak, Charlie Puth, Salman Khan, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Bollywood actor Salman Khan and more.
The hacker is asking Elon Musk to purchase these data to avoid a GDPR data breach fine from the EU which could go up to USD276 million. He/she claims that these private data include information like emails and phone numbers.
“Twitter or Elon Musk if you are reading this you are already risking a GDPR fine over 5.4m breach imaging the fine of 400m users breach source. Your best option to avoid paying $276 million in GDPR breach fines like Facebook did ((due to 533m users being scraped) is to buy this data exclusively,” reads a message from hacker. He/She has posted another link as well claiming that it doesn’t represent even 1 percent of the data that he possesses.
According to Alon Gal, Co-founder and CTO at Hudson Rock- an Israel- based cybercrime intelligence firm, an independent verification of the data posted by hacker shows that it is legitimate. While the hacker says he/she has acquired the data by exploiting a vulnerability, Gal believes that it was obtained from an API vulnerability allowing the hacker to “query any email/phone and retrieve a Twitter profile.”
The news comes after the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) began its investigation into a Twitter data leak that compromised personal data of over 5.4 million users last year. It included data like emails, phone numbers and Twitter IDs.
Twitter has given no official comment yet.
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