Twitter owner Elon Musk received some very special Christmas mail this year. In a relevant forum, a hacker indirectly published an offer to buy him – more than 400 million records of Twitter users, carefully sorted and provided with information such as email addresses and telephone numbers. According to Bleeping Computer, he wants $200,000 for it.
The information also includes contacts of celebrities. In a first excerpt, the hacker published, for example, the data of US billionaire Mark Cuban, politician son Donald Trump Junior, model Cara Delevigne, singer Shawn Mendes and basketball star Stephen Curry – always with them a coherent mailbox, sometimes with an American cell phone number.
The data comes from an older data leak from 2021, according to the hacker. With his offer “Ryushi”, the seller’s Internet name, is also aimed at the interested public, but actually more directly at Musk. He writes: “To avoid being fined $276 million in the EU like Facebook did, your best option is to buy this data exclusively.”
The hacker is referring to a judgment from the end of November, in which the Facebook parent company Meta was sentenced to a fine of 265 million euros because a data leak made 533 million data records public.
A similar case is already underway on Twitter. The day before Christmas Eve, Ireland’s DPC reported that it had begun investigating an incident on Twitter that leaked 5.4 million records – from the same source Ryushi got its information from. The authority is primarily concerned with the investigations as to whether the data was lost due to violations of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The hacker’s threat is therefore extremely inconvenient for Twitter, as the data could now become part of an ongoing investigation – unless Musk strikes, the hacker promises. If he pays, he will delete the traces on the network after the money has been received and will not offer the database to anyone else. Whether that would be an obstacle to the investigations by data protection officers is another matter.
If Musk can’t make up his mind, he should simply start a poll on Twitter, the hacker advises. In order to prove the authenticity of its data beyond the initially published examples, “Ryushi” offers a file that is said to contain data from 1,000 known Twitter users.
This table contains other celebrities, such as actress Whoopi Goldberg, Minister of Transport Volker Wissing, actor William Shatner, erotic actress Asa Akira or football commentator Wolff Fuss – sometimes with just their private e-mail address, sometimes including their phone number.
In case Musk wasn’t interested, the hacker left his Telegram contact details – anyone interested in the database can get in touch there, he writes. So far no buyer seems to have been found, the seller updates his offer almost daily to be seen better in the local market place.
