Bad news for Elon Musk and Twitter . In fact, a hacker recently claimed to have come into possession of data, both public (such as number of followers, account creation date, etc.) and private (telephone number, e-mail address, etc.) of over 400 millions of Twitter accounts , Apparently, this information was obtained last year by exploiting a security flaw in a backend API used in the Twitter Android application , which has now been fixed.
The data, which belongs to both to ordinary people that celebrities and other notable figures are for sale. According to Bleeping Computers, a copy of the database can be purchased exclusively for $200,000 or $60,000 per customer on a non-exclusive basis. The attacker also had the temerity to post the following direct message to Elon Musk and Twitter, advising them to buy the data exclusively to avoid paying heavier fines in the future:
Twitter or Elon Musk, I hope you you are reading. You are already risking a GDPR fine for 5.4 million violations, just imagine the fine for 400 million users violated. Your best option to avoid paying $276 million in GDPR fines like Facebook did (due to scraping 533 million users) is to buy this data exclusively.
Photo Credit: Unsplash.com About ten days ago, a tweet by Elon Musk had caused much discussion in which a new policy was announced with which the social network prohibited the insertion of links to competitors which, in essence, eliminated the possibility of promoting their links to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other sites, effectively preventing the many creators on Twitter from showing their Linktrees and other link aggregators in bio. Subsequently, Elon Musk himself specified that the policy will be changed in order to suspend only accounts whose main purpose is to promote competition, in compliance with the rules against spam. For more details on this, we advise you to read our previous dedicated article .