This Twitter vulnerability may have revealed owners of burner accounts

By Anita George August 8, 2022

Twitter recently announced the existence of a security vulnerability that poses a particular risk for anonymous and pseudonymous Twitter accounts.

On Friday, the popular social media platform published a blog statement describing the nature of the security vulnerability, which, if exploited, could let someone send contact information (phone numbers, email addresses) to Twitter’s systems, which would then “tell the person what Twitter account the submitted email addresses or phone number are associated with, if any.” Essentially, with this bug, if you had someone’s contact information, you could use it to figure out which accounts on Twitter were theirs.

And while Twitter says that this vulnerability has been fixed, the bug unfortunately hadn’t been fixed before someone took advantage of it.

According to Twitter’s blog statement, the bug was reported to Twitter in January 2022 and it “immediately investigated and fixed it.” But then, in July, it discovered via “a press report” that someone had already exploited the vulnerability and was now trying to sell the data they collected. Twitter then reviewed a sample of that data and was able to verify that someone had “taken advantage of the issue before it was addressed.”

While Twitter says that it will be contacting the owners of accounts that were affected by this bug and its subsequent breach, that pertains only to account owners that it can confirm were affected. In fact, the blog post announcement of this incident was published because Twitter says it’s not able to confirm all of the accounts that could have been affected and that it is also concerned about “pseudonymous accounts” being targeted by “state or other actors.” It is also worth noting that Twitter said that passwords were not exposed in this breach.

Twitter did offer some advice for those with pseudonymous accounts: Don’t add a publicly available email address or phone number to your Twitter account. And for all Twitter users: Use two-factor authentication for logging in.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Computing Writer

Anita has been a technology reporter since 2013 and currently writes for the Computing section at Digital Trends. She began…

Social Media

Twitter will soon be a bit less irritating for many people

With or without Elon Musk at the helm, Twitter can’t seem to decide what it wants to do with its algorithmic timeline, currently branded as “for you,” which shows tweets it thinks you'll like, whether or not you follow the tweeter.

For years it’s been messing about not only with the algorithm but also with the extent to which it forces the timeline on users.

Mobile

Thanks to Tapbots’ Ivory app, I’m finally ready to ditch Twitter for good

Ever since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, it’s been one chaotic new thing after another. You literally cannot go a day (or a few days or even a week) without some stupid new change to the site — whether it’s about checkmarks for verified or Twitter Blue subscriber accounts, how links to other social networks are banned and then reversed, view counts on Tweets, or something else. I can’t keep up with every little thing that has happened since the beginning of November, and it feels like the spotlight is always on the toxicity of the site in general.

New Twitter alternatives have been popping up recently, but it seems that the most popular one continues to be Mastodon. I originally made a Mastodon account back in 2018 when it first launched, but it never clicked with me back then, and I eventually went back to Twitter. With the Musk mess, I tried going back to Mastodon, but again, it didn’t really click with me — until Tweetbot developer, Tapbots, revealed its next project: Ivory.
The significance of Tapbots and Tweetbot

Social Media

What does the lock mean on Snapchat?

A person using Snapchat on an iPhone.

If you're new to Snapchat (or just a casual Snapchat user), you might not be aware of all of its features, including a certain lock-shaped icon. If you've ever wondered what that little lock icon means on Snapchat, you've come to the right place. In this guide, we'll explain what the lock is for and how it's connected to a Snapchat feature.
What does the lock mean on Snapchat?
In Snapchat, that lock icon indicates that the Snapchat story you're seeing is what's known as a Private Story.
What exactly is a Private Story?

A Private Story is a type of Snapchat story that allows the Snapchatter who posts it to restrict that story's visibility to only a few, select friends. That is to say, if you post a Private Story, you can choose which of your friends can see it. Additionally, the only user who can invite other users to it or add Snaps to a Private Story is the user who created the Private Story in the first place.