Twitter users horrified as 200m leaked email addresses sold on dark web, with experts blaming Musk’s mass -firing of staff

A major security breach at online micro-blogging site Twitter has been blamed on owner Elon Musk’s mass firing of staff.

Over 200 million Twitter users woke up to find their email and log-in details had been posted online.

According to several reports, the data was stolen over a year ago but has only just been put up for sale on ‘Breached’, a dark web market place.

The data, contains emails and partial log-in details for over 200m users is available for sale for the crypto currency equivalent of $2 (£1.69) each.

Alon Gal, of Israeli cyber security firm Hudson Rock first reported the breach over LinkedIn, he said it was “one of the most significant leaks I’ve seen.”

Meanwhile, Bleeping Computer, a New York based tech and security firm. said they had confirmed the validity of a number of the leaked emails. They also said the data included not only email addresses and phone numbers but also names, screen names/user handles, follower count, and account creation date.

The security breach comes as experts question whether Twitter will be able to handle system vulnerabilities. Since taking over the social media platform, Elon Musk has fired over half of Twitter staff.

Last week, two UK politicians saw their Twitter accounts hacked, spelling trouble for public figures on the platform.

A senior threat researcher at Sophos has advised caution saying: “Now is the time to assume a brace position for a possible crash of Twitter. This is what many information security professionals are doing: it’s what everyone should be doing now.”

According to cybersecurity experts at Wedbush Securities, Musk’s mass firing means that no one is left to “fix things” that are broken.

“There’s skeleton staff right now left and I think that’s pretty scary, especially around the cybersecurity side. You start to lose some key engineers, developers, key people internally, I think that’s where this thing can really cascade,” technology analyst Daniel Ives was quoted saying.

Twitter has been approached for comment.