Jan. 13 (Portaltic/EP) –
Twitter has ensured that “there is no evidence” that the data breach of more than 200 million of accounts on a hacking forum has occurred due to a vulnerability in their systems and has indicated that these are likely to be publicly available through other sources.
The platform has been the target of several malicious campaigns for months, which began in July 2022, when cybercriminals exploited a vulnerability in the platform’s application interface (API).
Thanks to this security flaw, outsiders who already had an email address or an associated phone number to one account they were able to find any other that had shared that data with the company.
Initially, Twitter was the victim of a cyberattack that resulted in the theft and leak of information of 5.4 million users, an attack that took place in July. Next, another threat actor claimed to own and sell 400 million data on Breached Forums of users on Twitter extracted through this vulnerability.
In early January, Bleeping Computer reported that another actor had put up for sale a data set belonging to just over 200 million Twitter profiles. In total, 221,608,279 accounts.
Then, this medium indicated that the data grouping was not new, but that it was the same as the previous one -the one with 400 million users-, but obtained after a cleaning process in which duplicate profiles were deleted.
The company has now denied that the cybercriminal was able to get hold of the stolen account data by exploiting a breach. “We conducted a thorough investigation and there is no evidence that the recently sold data was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability in Twitter systems”, can be read in this statement.
The social network has reviewed what happened as a result of this vulnerability, a consequence of an update to its code that took place in June 2021. With this, it has commented on the latest conclusions reached by its team Incident Response and Privacy and Protection.
In the first place, he recalled that the 5.4 million user accounts reported by the media in November corresponded to those already exposed in August 2022.
On the other hand, he has commented that “the 400 million instances of user data in the second alleged breach could not be correlated to the previously reported incident or any new incident.”
With this, he has pointed out that the last data set, the one reported in January of more than 200 million accounts is also unrelated with the previous incidents “nor with any data that originates from an exploitation of Twitter’s systems.”
It has also confirmed that both data pools were identical and that duplicate accounts were eliminated in the second. Finally, Twitter has stressed that there is no evidence that data being sold online have been obtained by exploiting a vulnerability in your systems.
“The data is likely to be a collection of data that are now publicly available online through different sources”, he concluded. He has also assured that he is in contact with the data protection authorities and other regulators “to provide clarification on the alleged incidents” and that he will continue to monitor them.
