Twitter would have been the victim of a hack of an unprecedented scale, leaking the data of nearly… 400 million accounts.
And this time, we will not be able to accuse Elon Musk, since this leak would have taken place in 2021.
Hacker offers Elon Musk an out-of-court settlement
Not a day goes by without hearing about Twitter. But for once, this has nothing to do with the turbulent year that has just passed and even less with the tumultuous relationship between the billionaire and the social network. Here, it is rather a question of piracy. And not just any!
Indeed, a hacker has just posted on the hacker forum Breaching an announcement where he claims to have the data of more than 400 million Twitter users, including email addresses and telephone numbers, acquired last year using a vulnerability (since fixed) in January 2022. A vulnerability already associated with the data leak of 5.4 million users.
In his message, the hacker, called Ryushi, offers Elon Musk and Twitter to buy back all the data for $200,000, so that they can then be deleted. ” Your best option to avoid paying $276 million in fines for GDPR violations like Facebook did (due to 533 million hacked users) is to buy that data exclusively he provided as a selling point.
Many personalities affected by the hack
And if ever Twitter, which has priority, does not put the requested amount on the table, Ryushi could monetize this database otherwise. Indeed, according to Bleeping Computerwithout news from the social network, it could put on sale this time several copies of the data, at the price of 60,000 dollars.
And given the pedigree of the hack victims, many people might be interested. US House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and Donald Trump Jr are among the injured parties, for example.
To support his threat, the hacker posted a link in his message showing how this data could be used for phishing campaigns, crypto scams or compromised professional emails. What convince Elon Musk to pay?
Source : Bleeping Computer
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