Twitter: No evidence linking leaked user data to vulnerability exploitation

BleepingComputer reports that Twitter has claimed that the recent leak of data belonging to 200 million of its users, including their email addresses, was not associated with the exploitation of an already patched vulnerability in the social media platform, which has been linked to an earlier data leak affecting 5.4 million users. "Based on information and intel analyzed to investigate the issue, there is no evidence that the data being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems. The data is likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources," said Twitter, who added that the 200 million dataset did not have any passwords or data that could have resulted to further compromise. However, no explanation has been provided by Twitter regarding the accurate correlation between the leaked data and impacted users' account-linked email addresses. Twitter said that it has been working with Data Protection Authorities and other data regulators regarding the leaks.