Addressing recent alleged data leaks, Twitter has announced that data being sold online was not obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of their systems.

In January 2022, a bug in Twitter’s system was revealed, which linked email and phone numbers submitted to Twitter’s systems to their associated account.

Later, in July 2022, it was revealed that a bad actor had exploited this bug before it was fixed, and was prepared to sell the data they had obtained.

Twitter claims that the alleged leak in November was of the same data initially obtained in July.

However, the most recent alleged leak of Twitter user data did not correlate to any of the data obtained by exploiting the bug in January 2022, and therefore was not part of a system breach.

Twitter instead claims that the 2023 data leak was obtained from publicly available information that was gathered elsewhere.

While Twitter did say they were in touch with the Data Protection Authorities regarding the breach, they did not provide further explanation on how user accounts were linked to the emails.

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Twitter faced many data breaches last year due to different exploitations, including 5.4 million user accounts being leaked online with non-public information.

The incidents lead to the Irish Data Protection Commission announcing an inquiry into the company in regards to it’s GDPR compliance for data protection.

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