CLOSE TO 33 million Twitter usernames and passwords have been obtained by a hacker who is now selling them on the dark web.
The passwords were believed to have been stolen directly from users instead of a breach. Michael Coates, a trust and info security officer at Twitter said it was “confident that our systems had not been breached”.
LeakedSource suggests that the cause may have been malware.It may have sent saved usernames and passwords from browsers like Chrome and Firefox back to the hackers from all websites they visited, not just Twitter.
The same thing happened with LinkedIn and MySpace after lists containing usernames and passwords obtained years ago were put up on sale. Another theory is the same passwords and emails leaked from these sites had been reused on Twitter.
Similar situations happened on Twitter in recent times. Earlier this week, the founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg was the victim of a hacking attack after a group called OurMine accessed his Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest accounts. They were quickly reclaimed.
Also, the Twitter accounts of Katy Perry, who has the most followers on the platform, and comedy rock group Tenacious D were breached. The latter resulted in a number of hoax tweets claiming that Jack Black had passed away.
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