Personal Information About 40 Million Twitter Users Like Actor Salman Khan and Sundar Pichai is for Sale on the Dark Web

By Divya Bhatia Last updated Apr 27, 2023

Personal Information About 40 Million Twitter Users Like Actor Salman Khan and Sundar Pichai is for Sale on the Dark Web: The report reveals that personal information about Twitter users, including email addresses, names, usernames, the number of followers, and even phone numbers, has been listed for sale on the dark web.

For Twitter, 2022 was a very eventful year. Although things aren’t exactly humming along at Elon Musk’s helm, they could be worse. According to recent reports, hackers have stolen the personal information of nearly 40 crore users, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Bollywood actor Salman Khan. Allegedly, all the information is sold on the dark web.

Information about Twitter users, including email addresses, names, usernames, lists of followers, and even phone numbers in some cases, has been found for sale on the dark web, according to a report published by the Israeli cyber intelligence firm Hudson Rock.

Even though this isn’t the first time hackers have accessed the information of millions of Twitter users, it is by far the largest breach ever discovered. A few months ago, the personal information of over 5,4 million Twitter users was compromised. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has just declared that it will be looking into a data breach that occurred in the past.

Largest Twitter Disclosure

In the most recent leak, an unknown hacker uploaded a data dump to a hacker forum. The data snippets displayed the types of information that can be purchased anonymously online. Some well-known accounts were also found to have been breached in the leak, as was previously revealed. Here are just a few of these well-known account holders:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
SpaceX
CBS Media
Donald Trump Jr.
Doja Cat
Charlie Puth
Sundar Pichai
Salman Khan
NASA’s JWST account
NBA
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, India
Shawn Mendes
Social Media of WHO

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According to Hudson Rock, a Twitter API flaw may have given the hacker access to the private information of millions of users. Personal information, including email addresses and phone numbers, may have been compromised for billions of Twitter users due to this security flaw. The hacker’s message was captured by Hudson Rock, who then posted screenshots of it on the dark web.

The hacker posted the following message: “Imagine the fine for a breach of 400 million users if you’re Twitter or Elon Musk and you’re reading this. Avoid the $276 million USD in GDPR breach fines that Facebook paid (due to 533m users being scraped) by purchasing this data on an exclusive basis.”

The hacker also indicated his willingness to “deal” via an intermediary. “When that time is up, I will remove this thread and never offer this information for sale again. As a result, your users will be protected from the likes of phishing, crypto scams, sim swapping, doxxing, and other attacks that target celebrities and politicians, as their data will never be sold.

Lose faith in you as a company, halting your current growth and hype. Imagine popular content creators and influencers being hacked on Twitter, and you can bet they will abandon the service. This will put an end to your vision of Twitter as a video-sharing platform for creators “As shown in the screenshot that Hudson Rock posted, the hacker made the following claim.

Hudson Rock co-founder and CTO Alon Gal wrote on LinkedIn that “the data is increasingly more likely to be valid and was probably obtained from an API vulnerability enabling the threat actor to query any email/phone and retrieve a Twitter profile,” adding that the situation was “extremely similar to the Facebook 533m database that I originally reported about in 2021 and resulted in a $275,000,000 fine to Meta.”

Neither Twitter nor Elon Musk has publicly acknowledged the data breach as of yet. Over five million Twitter accounts were reportedly compromised, prompting an investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC).

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