The email addresses tied to 235 million Twitter accounts have been shared in an online hacking forum. There were no clues to identify the location of the hackers, or exactly when the breach occurred. It’s possible that the data was accessed by various hackers who complied their own different collections of data with different intentions.
From June 2021 until January 2022, there was a bug in a Twitter application programming that allowed attackers to “scrape” data from the social network. Therefore, this breach could have happened as early as 2021, before Musk took ownership of the company.
Experts say the situation is very significant and will lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing, and doxxing. Hackers could also use the email addresses to attempt to reset passwords and take control of accounts. Twitter has not commented on the report and it isn’t clear what action, if any, Twitter has taken to investigate or remediate the issue.