The E15 newspaper has been investigating a massive Twitter data breach that affected more than 200 million accounts. It turns out that in the information package, which is sold on the Internet for a few tens of crowns, there are also hundreds of thousands of accounts with a possible Czech origin. This may expose the identity of a number of anonymous accounts. In addition, affected users may become more vulnerable targets for hackers. The data package also includes private email addresses assigned to usermes.
Users living in totalitarian countries are especially at risk. The data can be used by local police for other purposes, for example, to identify activists and people spreading information that is inconvenient for the regime. However, the leak could also have interesting implications for the indoor scene.
Email accounts from Sezm.cz, after clearing duplicate data in the database, number 186 300, from Centrum.cz 20 349 and from Volny.cz 4 114, suggest that they are mainly used by local users. Thus, a significant proportion of Czech Twitter users are likely to have suffered from a data breach.
If, for example, a user appears under an anonymous pseudonym and at the same time uses his persol email for an account with a significant digital footprint, there is a risk of his identity being exposed.
In the Czech environment, a data breach could reveal who runs powerful anonymous Twitter accounts and whether they are related to marketing or politics, for example. In the past, for example, the popular parody account Jie Tien Ming, which has been repeatedly cited in the media, was found to be owned by Shimon Erlich of the Government Apparatus press office, who confirmed the identity of the account owner.
In 2020, Facebook had the same privacy breach as Twitter. Due to a platform bug, users could briefly see who mages certain pages. It was then that it turned out that the page of Andrei Babiš was controlled by marketer Marek Prchal and more than a dozen people from the press service of the ANO movement and the government.
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Source: Blesk