Social Media Platform Twitter Hijacked, Email Addresses Stolen

Leading social media platform Twitter had its account hacked a few hours ago.

With this latest development, over 200 million email addresses of Twitter users have been stolen by hackers.

Worse still is the fact that these addresses have been shared on an online hacking forum according to comments on Wednesday by a security researcher.

Following comments by Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cybersecurity-monitoring firm, Hudson Rock, who reacted on LinkedIn, the breach “will unfortunately lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing and doxxing.”

According to Gal, it is “one of the most significant leaks I've seen.”

Last year, the takeover of Twitter's Management by Elon Musk, also currently Tesla's CEO, was widely reported.

Before the deal was sealed, Musk and Twitter's board went along with Twitter's sale-off price of $44 billion.

There has not been any official remark so far following Gal's first social media post on December 24.

It is not also clear whether Twitter has taken measures so far to either investigate the story or mitigate its negative impacts.

At this time of reporting, AllNews Nigeria is unable to independently authenticate the news data as to its possible origin from Twitter.  

Troy Hunt, creator of breach-notification site, Have I Been Pwned, said on Twitter that it seemed “pretty much what it’s been described as.”, this development seems cocksure!

Unclear statistics regarding the breach's sheer size and scope as earlier reported in December point to about 400 million email addresses and phone numbers being stolen.

The implication of this magnitude of the Twitter security breach is particularly interesting to regulators on both sides of the Atlantic divide.  

On one hand is the Irish Data Protection Commission, Twitter's European headquarters.

On another hand is the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, known to have been respectively monitoring the now Elon Musk-owned Twitter for compliance with European data protection rules and a U.S. consent order.