Millions of Twitter users' data was ‘stolen’, say reports.
The email addresses of more than 200 million Twitter users were handed out free of charge on a hacker forum, accoridng to a website.
Twitter did not respond to the claims but Alon Gal - a representative from Hudson Rock, the company who made the allegation - ruled it “significant”.
He told BBC News that it unfortunately led to a lot of accounts getting hacked, targeted with phishing, and doxxed.”
The latter is publishing personal information, such as their location, that can lead to the idenification.
Last month, a watchdog was ordered to investigate Twitter - which was taken over by Elon Musk - after a hacker was believed to have data from 400 million accounts, a problem first identified by Hudson Rock.
People targetted included the broadcaster Piers Morgan, the politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and many others.
At the time, Alon told the same outlet: "The hacker aims to sell the database through an escrow service that is offered on a cyber-crime forum. Typically this is only done for real offerings."
The 51-year-old billionaire has faced criticism after he gutted more than half of the social media giant’s workforce, including making significant cuts to its data protection teams.
The SpaceX founder - who has gained a reputation for replying to individual users like the author Stephen King, who complained about the changes made by Elon - did not respond to the problem on the site despite demands.
Brian Krebs, an investigative reporter tweeted on December 27th: “Hey
@elonmusk, since you don't seem to have much a media/comms team anymore, can you address the apparently legitimate claim that someone scraped is now selling data on hundreds of millions of Twitter accounts? Maybe it didn't happen on your watch, but you owe Twitter a reply,” a message the Tesla CEO did not publicly acknowledge.
