Former prime minister Scott Morrison is one in every of many public figures stung in an alleged safety breach through which a hacker has claimed to have obtained the info of 400 million Twitter customers.
Mr Morrison’s parliamentary e mail handle, alongside along with his username and a cellphone quantity linked to his Twitter account, had been included within the info dump, posted on a discussion board simply days earlier than Christmas.
In a chilling twist, the discussion board is similar one utilized by the Optus hacker who tried to extort the info of tens of millions of Australians.
Within the submit on the discussion board – utilized by hackers and for info dumping – the alleged hacker stated he was promoting the info of 400 million Twitter customers he claimed was “scraped by way of a vulnerability”.
Mr Morrison’s particulars are listed within the submit, alongside these of the likes of former US president Donald Trump, British broadcaster Piers Morgan and US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
No passwords seem to have been leaked.
“Twitter or Elon Musk in case you are studying this you’re already risking a GDPR superb over 5.4m breach imaging the superb of 400m customers breach,” the alleged hacker wrote.
“I’ll recommendation (sic) you, Your only option to keep away from paying $276 million USD in GDPR breach fines like fb did… is to purchase this information solely.”
The alleged hacker claimed the info was “utterly non-public”.
Nevertheless, Mr Morrison’s parliamentary e mail was listed within the info dump, regardless of it being publicly obtainable on his Parliament Home net web page.
Mr Morrison’s workplace was contacted for remark.
Israeli cyber intelligence company Hudson Rock responded to the difficulty on Christmas Eve, saying it was not potential to confirm whether or not 400 million distinctive accounts had been compromised.
“From an impartial verification the info itself seems to be respectable and we are going to observe up with any developments,” the agency tweeted on Christmas Day.
However in one other twist, Hudson Rock days later confirmed Piers Morgan’s account had been hacked.
“That is possible not a coincidence: the revelation of the e-mail handle might have been simply what the hacker wanted to search out passwords for the account, or social engineer his means,” it stated.
The brand new menace comes months after an enormous cybersecurity breach rocked Optus and healthcare supplier Medibank.
The weird Optus breach concerned a hacker claiming he had stolen the small print of 10 million present and former clients, earlier than releasing the knowledge of 10,000.
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He then apologized and backed down from his makes an attempt to solicit tens of millions from the federal government.
Earlier this month, Russian hackers posted the non-public information of consumers in a sequence of posts, with the corporate refusing to comply with a ransom demand from the hackers.
