What Twitter’s 200 million e mail leak actually means

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After experiences on the finish of 2022 that hackers have been promoting knowledge stolen from 400 million Twitter customers, researchers now say {that a} extensively circulated trove of e mail addresses linked to about 200 million customers is probably going a refined model of the bigger trove with duplicate entries eliminated. The social community has not but commented on the huge publicity, however the cache of information clarifies the severity of the leak and who could also be most in danger because of it.

From June 2021 till January 2022, there was a bug in a Twitter utility programming interface, or API, that allowed attackers to submit contact info like e mail addresses and obtain the related Twitter account, if any, in return. Earlier than it was patched, attackers exploited the flaw to “scrape” knowledge from the social community. And whereas the bug did not permit hackers to entry passwords or different delicate info like DMs, it did expose the connection between Twitter accounts, which are sometimes pseudonymous, and the e-mail addresses and telephone numbers linked to them, doubtlessly figuring out customers.

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