It has been revealed by a small cybercrime intelligence company known as Hudson Rock that the personal information of 400 million individuals, including Vitalik Buterin, Kevin O’Leary, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Mark Cuban, has been breached and is presently being sold on the black market.
BREAKING: Hudson Rock discovered a credible threat actor is selling 400,000,000 Twitter users data.
— Hudson Rock (@RockHudsonRock) December 24, 2022
The private database contains devastating amounts of information including emails and phone numbers of high profile users such as AOC, Kevin O'Leary, Vitalik Buterin & more (1/2). pic.twitter.com/wQU5LLQeE1
According to Hudson Rock, the confidential database has an enormous quantity of information, including the email addresses and phone numbers of a significant number of other influential people.
The company also said that the hacker has claimed that the data was collected in early 2022 as a result of a vulnerability in Twitter, and that they had attempted to coerce Elon Musk into purchasing the data or risk facing GDPR litigation.
Despite the fact that Hudson Rock has not been able to completely validate the hacker’s claims due to the large number of accounts involved, the company has said that an independent verification of the data itself suggests that it is authentic.
The intrusion has been disclosed not just by Hudson Rock but also by the Web3 security company DeFiYield. The business claims that they have gotten in touch with the hacker using the messaging app Telegram.
DeFiYield says:
“Yes, this is real. We have checked each of 1,000 accounts given by the hacker as the SAMPLE. We were able to verify the big % of these accounts’ data is real: both emails and phone numbers.”
No official report has been released to confirm this, however there are risks associated with having such information published online, such as targeted phishing efforts through SMS and email, sim switch attacks to get access to accounts, and doxing.
