The social media giant claims the alleged data leak of 200 million users was not stolen by exploiting its systems.
This week Twitter officially responded to accusations of an enormous dataset of user email addresses being stolen from its systems and subsequently sold online.
Twitter’s Privacy Center issued an update on Wednesday that addressed “recent media reports” circulating over the past few days. The company said it “conducted a thorough investigation and found no evidence that data recently being sold was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems”.
The latest
In August, the company confirmed that a data breach impacting 5.4 million Twitter users resulted from threat actors exploiting a vulnerability fixed in January 2022.
Today, Twitter said that another dataset containing email addresses linked to 200 million Twitter users, reportedly leaked online earlier this month, was not obtained by exploiting that vulnerability it had patched in January 2022.
The organization claimed that the dataset “could not be correlated with the previously reported incident or any data originating from an exploitation of Twitter systems”.
Twitter also noted that reports claiming that the personal data of 400 million Twitter users were available were a ruse. According to the organization, the two datasets were the same, and the one with only 200 million users simply had duplicates removed.
Furthermore, “none of the datasets analyzed contained passwords or information that could lead to passwords being compromised”, Twitter said.
‘Other sources’
“Based on information and intel analyzed to investigate the issue, there is no evidence that the data being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems”, the update reads. Twitter added that the data is “likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources”.
“We are in contact with Data Protection Authorities and other relevant regulators from different countries to provide clarification about the alleged incidents and we will continue to do so.”
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