Why you need to change your Twitter password immediately

The personal information of more than 200 million Twitter users was recently leaked and put on a hacker platform, according to reports. And you should be worried.

According to Bleeping Computer, hackers have sold and circulated massive sets of data from users' profiles on the social media platform to forums and cybercrime markets since July 2022.

This contained private information like phone numbers, email addresses, names, and profile creation dates.

It was apparently obtained in 2021 due to hackers utilizing Twitter's API, which allowed people to type in phone numbers and addresses to see if they were connected with a Twitter ID.

Bleeping Computer also said the hackers used another API to scrape the public Twitter data for the ID, joining the public information with private email addresses and phone numbers to create profiles of Twitter users.

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Twitter did rectify this issue in January 2022, but the hackers started to leak the data sets they collected at no cost over a year ago.

On Wednesday (4 January), a hacker released the data of the 200 million Twitter profiles on the hacking platform Breached, selling it for around $2.

How can you find out if your information was leaked?

Bleeping Computer said it depends on whether your email was released in former data breaches.

However, the outlet mentioned a free data breach alert service called Have I Been Pwnd (HIBP), which added the Twitter leak to its system.

In doing so, the system has begun to alert subscribers if their email was discovered in the data.

This tool was created by Troy Hunt, a Microsoft Regional Director.

You can also check to see if their emails are part of the leak by visiting the HIBP and typing in your email.

You can visit Have I Been Pwned to check the Twitter leak and search with your email.

And as stated above, if the emails are in the leak, HIBP will alert you with a list of detected data breaches, which includes the Twitter one.

Although the leak contains email addresses, this also raises privacy concerns for those who use the account incognito.

The leak could make it possible to identify those users, revealing their actual identities.

Elsewhere, it can also be helpful to change your password and avoid phishing scams trying to steal it and other information.

Indy100 reached out to Twitter for comment.

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