Identity Theft

By: Arden N. Patterson

Twitter had a data breach because the data breach allowed an attacker to get access to the contact

details of 5.4M accounts. Twitter has confirmed the security vulnerability which allowed the data

to be extracted. The people responsible for the twitter data breach is people from a hacker group

called 0ktapu. The reason the data breaches was caused because of stolen or weak credentials. If

malicious criminals have your username and password combination, they have an open door into

your network. The data that was lost phone numbers and email addresses from 5.4 million

accounts. This affected the company by losing revenue and users. This is a long-term 4affect

because a non-functional website, for example, may cause potential customers to explore other

options. A couple ways twitter has resolved this is by being transparent, being accurate and

offering support. Plus, it was reported that many of the accounts that were up for sale, according

to the hacker belonged to, “celebrities, companies, randoms, OGs, etc. ‘OGs’ refers to Twitter

handles that are either made up of a desirable word like a first name or are very short and contain

only a few letters. Also, Twitter advised every user to change their password after the company

discovered a bug that left passwords exposed in an internal system. While there was no evidence

of a breach or misuse, the passwords were unencrypted in an internal log, making them readable

to anyone who accessed that system. The company said that attackers were able to gain access to

account information, specifically usernames and email addresses. Twitter became aware of an

issue after it detected signs of an attack about a week prior to the announcement. That activity

led to a investigation which made the company aware of the larger breach, namely, unauthorized
access attempts. The 2021 Thales Data Threat Report found that almost half (45%) of US

companies suffered a data breach in the past year. But this could be higher due to the potential

for yet undetected breaches. Interestingly, the same number of respondents had noticed an

increase in the scale, frequency, or sophistication of these attempts. This figure is a reduction

from 2019, when 65 percent of companies had experienced a breach.