In today’s world, everyone needs to keep an eye on their personal data, especially Twitter users. When the hackers get a chance, they hack one’s data and do misuse it. So, to prevent any hazard from occurring, you need to stay alert and cautious.
It has been revealed that a data breach exposed the email addresses of over 200 million Twitter users. Approximately 18 million people use Twitter in the UK, but it’s unclear how many of them may have been harmed.
The social networking platform has not officially acknowledged the incident. Still, Hudson Rock Alon Gal, the co-founder of the Israeli cybersecurity firm that first disclosed the breach in a Linkedin post, dubbed it “one of the most serious breaches” he has ever seen.
Gal was able to submit screencaps from the internet boards to verify the claims. He was doing so even though they were not officially confirmed.
Since the $44 billion takeover was finalised in November, the Elon Musk-led business has laid off many IT employees as part of the tycoon’s cost-cutting initiatives. The company’s employment has been reduced by almost half.
Lea Kissner, Twitter’s information security head, resigned through a Tweet in November of last year, and several of the company’s senior cybersecurity employees have left due to this change.
The data may have been hacked much earlier; it’s uncertain if the breach happened when Musk ran the company. Meanwhile, Twitter has long faced criticism for its purported cybersecurity policies.
Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the former chief of security of Twitter, claimed in August 2022 that he had found “severe, egregious deficiencies by Twitter in every area of his mandate.
The mandate includes user privacy, digital and physical security, and platform integrity/content moderation” in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Federal Trade Commission, and the US Justice Department.
Zatko, who worked at Twitter from November 2020 to January 2022, was let go by the company’s previous CEO, Parag Agrawal, after the executive was accused of circulating fake information.
According to the accusations, a third of Twitter employees were allegedly found to have blocked software and security upgrades on their computers.
Ceri Shaw, a chief delivery officer at CodeClan, recommends Twitter users keep a watchful eye out for any strange activity, such as “targeted phishing emails,” “password-reset emails,” and “odd pop-ups on their device.”
Shaw also urges Twitter to review its security settings and often change passwords to make them more challenging to crack. Passwords should not be related to any of your personal information, she continued and should consist of a mix of unusual characters, letters, and numbers.
The financial fallout from a situation like this could be severe for Twitter. At the same time, we’ve already seen some major digital companies receive multi-million dollar penalties for serious data protection violations.