Twitter is one of the most widely used social media in the platform with a history of cyber attacks. Quite recently Twitter went on to lock down millions of users accounts after reports came in about the sale of log-in details. A number of reports have surfaced stating that a particular Russian hacker going by the name Tessa88 has been selling Twitter log in details worth 32 million in number at the rate of just 10 bitcoins. In short this Russian hacker is selling stolen log in details of the Twitter users for just about £4000.

Twitter swings into action by locking the accounts

However this social media has maintained that the hack on log in details is not a result of the attack on its servers rather it has been procured from other alternatives by the hacker. After performing some stringent assessment of the list , it has been able to discover the authentic users and since then it has locked their accounts and asked them to reset the passwords.

The chief security officer named Michael Coates has stated in the blogpost that the log in details being sold by the Russian hacker has been accumulated by combing info from various other breaches in the past. Another security firm named Leaked Source has even suggested that log in details collected by the hacker has been generated from PCs which were infected with the data stealing malwares.

 

Twitter tries to minimize the damage

Twitter account details being sold by the hacker has been declared to be legit and this has made Twitter to lock down millions of accounts in order to minimize the damage. A number of security experts cross referencing the data being sold has asserted that the names used in the 32 million list of log in names appears to be genuine which a concern for the privacy of the Twitter users.

Per Thorsheim who is respected figure among the tech companies and known to offer remarkable insight in dealing with the security and lo-in related issues. He was quite skeptical of the data being sold and he believes the data is simply made up junk by the hacker. He further elaborates that the data must have accumulated from the time when Twitter just had 32 million users. Some of the data might be legit but most of it will be useless with legit log-in names only.

Troy Hunt another commendable person to talk on this issue states that he also have his doubts on the authenticity of the complete set of Twitter log in details data. He further states that it is not possible to perform an independent data breach and do away with as many as 32 million Twitter accounts data. It is worth noting that it had a rough history of massive breaches in the past few years which resulted in losing wide amount of user data. Cybercriminals are very much interested in getting their hand on this data in order to cause wreak and reap profits from it.