To light up two-factor authentication for your Twitter account now if you haven’t already.
Email addresses linked to 235 million Twitter accounts have been shared on an online hacking forum, according to the Washington Post. While this is unlike any other leaked information, the obvious concern here is that malicious actors could potentially expose the identities of people who like to post anonymously using said email addresses. In countries that crack down hard on political dissent, for example, this could be a huge problem for online activists.
At this time, the consensus seems to be that these accounts were taken down in late 2021 using an exploit that Twitter identified and corrected in January 2022. The cybersecurity site Have I been pwned added this leak to their database, so you can go there, enter your email address, and find out if your account was affected by the hack.
Troy Hunt, owner of Have I Been Pwned, identified 211 million unique email addresses in the hack.
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According to the Online Computing Centered Community website BeepComputer, there is not much you can do at this time if your account has been included in the hack. You can thwart attempts by hackers to change your account password by enabling 2FA, and you should be wary of emails that ask for personal information like a Twitter password, as these are likely to be phishing attempts.
Other than that, all you can do now is hope and pray that Elon Musk left enough Twitter staff in place to prevent more leaks like this in the future.
