With millions of Twitter accounts having their private details sold online – 32 million in fact, being sold for 10 Bitcoin (£4,000) on the dark web – the social media company chose to cross-check the data in the breach with their own records.
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Users anxious about being caught up in the recent leak of more than 32 million Twitter login credentials should already know if they’ve been hacked.
Both LeakedSource and Twitter suggest that the database of records could have been created by combining information from other breaches or from password-stealing malware on user machines. The search engine says it has very strong evidence that Twitter was not hacked, rather the consumer was. The credentials are “real and valid” as out of 15 users asked, all 15 verified their passwords, LeakedSource said.
The claim that user data was gained from malware-infected PCs backs up Twitter’s statement that its systems had not been breached.
Twitter has locked accounts with direct password exposure, following reports of hack in to its systems. As a result, a number of Twitter accounts were identified for extra protection.
Twitter told Huffington Post that it has been working to protect users who may have had their account information exposed by other data breaches.
In the post, Coates said the company is “confident the information was not obtained from a hack of Twitter’s servers”.
Hackers took over the NFL’s Twitter account Tuesday and falsely claimed commissioner Roger Goodell had died. Predictably, the most common Twitter password “123456”, followed by the imaginative “123456789”.
A hacker offered to sell the account information of 117 million LinkedIn users that were stolen as part of a 2012 breach which appears much worse than originally thought.
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Another possibility being put forth by security analysts is that the latest Twitter records could have been sourced from the databases from the several data breaches that occurred in recent times.
