Crypto Phishing Scams Likely Coming as Hacker Leaks Emails of 235M Twitter Users

Crypto investors and users should be aware of potential phishing and other types of attacks in the coming days, as the hacker who stole the personal data of over 235 million Twitter users has made it publicly available.

The attacker behind the Twitter data breach first announced the hack in late December. They asked for $200,000 from Twitter to return the stolen data and warned that if the company fails to pay them, they’ll release the data to the public for free.

The now publicly available database contains 63 GB of users’ email addresses, account names, handles, creation dates, and follower counts. It doesn’t include phone numbers. One member of the forum where the dataset was published said that original file dates and account creation dates suggest that the data was collected from early 2021 to December 14, 2022.

Researchers at Privacy Affairs confirmed the leak and said the database includes accounts of popular people and entities like Donald Trump Jr, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the NBA, and others.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, prominent investor Kevin O’Leary and other well-known crypto personalities are also included in the database.

Privacy Affairs said that the leaked personal information, especially email addresses, might be used to engineer social attacks like phishing, spam, scam marketing campaigns, doxxing, etc.

The crypto community might have seen a foreshadowing of what might come in late December when O’Leary’s account got hacked. The hacker posted multiple links to scam crypto giveaways of 5,000 BTC and 15,000 ETH. O’Leary has since regained control of his account.

It is recommended that Twitter users change their passwords and, if possible, email addresses to prevent any potential attacks. Using different passwords and email addresses for different services is also recommended.

Twitter has been fighting off bots and scammers for quite some time now. The current data leak will likely encourage even more scammers to trick crypto users and investors on Twitter. They should be extra careful when opening emails, clicking on suspicious links, and entering their sensitive information on fishy websites.