Email addresses linked to 235M Twitter accounts leaked in hack

More than 200 million Twitter accounts, including email addresses, were leaked this week, raising privacy and security concerns.

Alan Gal, the co-founder of Israeli security firm Hudson Rock, reportedly first uncovered the leak and took to social media to alert the public.

“The database contains 235,000,000 unique records of Twitter users and their email addresses and will unfortunately lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing, and doxxing,” Gal said on LinkedIn. 

“This is one of the most significant leaks I’ve seen,” he added. 

According to The Washington Post, Gal discovered the leak on a popular online hacking forum but did not provide a name.

This is the latest data breach involving Twitter. In August, Twitter said that a hacker had exploited a bug in its system and was attempting to sell personal data they had obtained. 

The company said that the bug was first discovered in January 2022 but was quickly fixed, adding that there was no evidence suggesting that personal data was compromised as a result of the vulnerability.

In July, however, Twitter was notified that someone had potentially exploited the vulnerability and was offering to sell personal information. 

The social media platform said at the time that it would be notifying the account owners that were affected by the breach. 

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment about the latest breach.