Major Data Breach Affects Twitter, LinkedIn & Weibo

Uploaded on 2024-01-27 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Social Media, FREE TO VIEW

Your personal data could be at serious risk after cyber security experts uncovered what is potentially the biggest data breach of all time. The breach was discovered by researchers from Security Discovery and CyberNews, who found an unsecured database containing a vast trove of data amounting to 12 terabytes.

The leaked information includes sensitive personal details that could potentially lead to a surge in cybercrime activities such as identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyber attacks, and unauthorised access to personal and sensitive accounts.

The leak that contains private info from LinkedIn, Twitter, Weibo, Tencent, and other platforms’ user data, is almost certainly the largest ever discovered. Chinese instant messaging app Tencent QQ has been the most affected with a total of 1.4 billion records stolen, according to the researchers.

It also involves data from other popular apps including MySpace, Adobe, MyFitnessPal, JD.com and more.

Over 280m Twitter records were leaked in the breach and over 250m LinkedIn records were also breached.
Bob Dyachenko a cyber security researcher and the owner of SecurityDiscovery.com, and Cybernews are credited with the terrible discovery.

It is thought the hacker might not be discovered but this could cause a massive wave of cybercrime. The researchers said, “The dataset is extremely dangerous as threat actors could leverage the aggregated data for a wide range of attacks, including identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyberattacks, and unauthorised access to personal and sensitive accounts.” Cybernews suggests the person storing this data could be a “malicious actor, data broker, or some service that works with large amounts of data.”

The data hasn’t been described in detail but is said to be sensitive and valuable to cyber criminals, although it possible some of the 26 billion stolen data records found could be duplicates.

The leak is also said to involve data from various government organisations in the US, Brazil, Germany, Philippines, and Turkey, as well as other countries. According to the experts, the impact of this could be unprecedented.

Be aware any suspicious activity on your social media or banking apps and be alert to the risk of phishing emails.

CyberNews: Forbes: Businesss Today: News.com.au: Sun: NDTV: LBC: The Stack:

Image: Rodion Kutsaiev

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