Twitter Inc on Wednesday said there was no evidence that data recently being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability in the company’s systems. It informed that the data of 5.4 million of the accounts had been compromised by a bug it discovered early last year, which it previously fixed and disclosed over the summer.
In a blog post as seen by Reuters, Twitter said that around 600 million pieces of user data could not be correlated with the previously reported incident, nor with any new incident.
“There is no evidence that the data being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems. The data is likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources,” it said.
In last August, the social media company told users that a system vulnerability revealed Twitter accounts of users by submitting their email address or phone number, after the company learnt about it through a bug bounty program months earlier, as per Reuters reports.
In December, media reports claimed that someone could gain access to over 400 million Twitter-associated user emails and phone numbers, and that the data had been exposed through the same vulnerability discovered in January 2022.
A security researcher has recently stated that hackers stole the email addresses of more than 200 million Twitter users and posted them on an online hacking forum.
There were no clues to the identity or location of the hacker or hackers behind the breach. It may have taken place as early as 2021, which was before Elon Musk took over ownership of the company last year.
Claims about the size and scope of the breach initially varied with early accounts in December saying 400 million email addresses and phone numbers were stolen.
(With Reuters inputs)
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