An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter

privacy.twitter.com

807 pointsWaitWaitWha450 comments

Remember that phone numbers are only 10 digits long, so brute forcing all phone numbers is totally doable.

Considering that, if you implement any flow that involves checking if a phone number is already in use, then you are effectively leaking to an attacker a list of every phone number that uses your product.

In the USA.

They range from 4 (St. Helena) to 13 (Austria), I believe.

It's typically smaller though, not every phone number is allocated and many are in sequential groups. Some are special cased, you don't need to search any number matching `****555***` in north america for example, which cuts down on the search space quite a bit.

"Quite a bit"? Filtering out ***555**** removes only 0.1% of phone numbers ;)

That's one example of an invalid range, not all of them. Lots of the area codes in north america just haven't been used for one reason or another.

I didn't do the math here but: Filtering out 5*... would remove 10% of the search space. (dots mean "followed by more stars")

Filtering out *5*... would remove 1%. So wouldn't ***555**** remove closer to 0.01%, not 0.1%?

Try the math, this is a good problem to work through. The position of the 5 doesn't impact the search space like that. 10% of the 10 digit numbers start with a 5. 10% of the 10 digit numbers end with a 5. 5... in your example shouldn't be 1%.

St Helena changed to 5 digits nearly 7 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_telephone_prefi...

Rate limiting should be used to mitigate this, although I suppose a botnet could overcome that to some extent proportional to the size of the botnet.

And for anyone who didn't read TFA, this incident goes well beyond leaking what phone numbers use the product, it leaked the usernames associated with each as well.

Rate limiting is not useful meaningfully. For a service we ran we regularly had botnets with 100k+ IP addresses making one request an hour to endpoints, which absolutely decimated the backend but hit no limits at all that a real user wouldn't also trigger. Even with a couple of requests an hour you could enumerate the entire phone number space in a very short period with that botnet.

I guess I was thinking more like "limiting the number of attempts" than "limiting the number of attempts over time" -- take time out of the equation (but then NAT causes trouble). But even so, you're right: as the threat landscape approaches the size of the result set, it breaks down no matter what.

That has some problems. If you limit the total number of attempts globally then the feature is effectively disabled, every botnet and script will blow through the attempt budget and real users can't use it. Global limits and IP address limits are not useful, and because we're assuming the user is unauthenticated (using the password reset), we have no other way of distinguishing good traffic.

Captcha comes to mind, but that's a cat-and-mouse game in the age of machine learning (not to mention actual humans working for a bad actor). Cloudflare seems to be on the cutting edge with their newest challenge mechanism, but good vs bad is somewhat distinct from human vs script.

My wife was in charge of security at MySpace back when MySpace was still a thing and there was one occasion that the MySpace team was manually feeding images to a suspected human acting as a bot. As I recall it became clear to both sides that there were humans on the other end and it ended with a picture of a scantily-clad woman and a response of “very funny.”

Solving a few thousand captchas an hour costs you like 200$ per day. Forget about it if someone is dedicated.

How do you defend against such an attack? Putting a service behind something like Cloudflare won't bring it down but it will still leak the phone numbers existence, no?

Usually you'd try to make the effort/cost no longer worth the data with minimal user impact. For instance, text/email the inputted address with the result instead of displaying it to the requestor through the browser

Or if this functionality needs to return the value, require an authenticated user and impose rate limits based on reputation (which could just be account age)

For instance, Facebook and Twitter used to tell you which profile a phone number belonged to when you put it in the search box (maybe it was this issue). You could restrict that to authenticated users that were 30 days+ old and impose rate limits per day on top of that. A regular user could still look up a few numbers per day but someone enumerating phone numbers would need lots of 1 month old accounts (more effort/cost)

Don't leak whether or not the phone number belongs to an account. All failed login attempts should be some form of "Invalid login" regardless of whether or not it was an attempt against an actual account or not.

Also worth noting that time response deviance when user exists or not can also be a leak of info

Out of curiosity, how does someone possibly get 100k+ IP addresses? I had enough trouble getting 1 public IP address.

People build botnets by enticing people to install trojans on their computers, e.g. a free utility app or game.

They can then earn money from people who want to rent access to these botnets.

There are also free VPN services who, in their fine print, say that users grant them permission to route other traffic via their connections.

There are "residential proxy services" offering exactly this and you only ever pay for bandwidth. Using 100,000 unique non-datacenter IPs will only cost you few thousand dollars as long as you only sending tiny API requests.

And this is service offered by registered Israeli company that get formal agreement from "bots" to route traffic through them. Very shady, but totally legal service that used by a lot of data collection agencies for price tracking on Amazon or getting data from Linkedin, etc.

botnets. With all of the crappy IoT devices out there it is even easier to get inside of consumers networks.

CPU throughput =/= endpoint throughput

It's interesting to wonder why only 5M accounts were affected by this exploit, especially if it's brute forceable. IIRC this vulnerability was widely known about for at least months before it was fixed, so I can't imagine nobody in the know had access to the resources/botnets necessary to enumerate through every account.

Have only 5M accounts linked their phone numbers on Twitter? That's less than 2% of their total accounts (~290M). I don't know what the industry average is for linking phone numbers, but this seems like an exceptionally low ratio.

Maybe Musk is right, they are all bots.

Maybe Musk is behind this to weasel out of the contract?

Yes he certainly is; he also reported it afterwards via HackerOne to get that $5k bounty. Two birds one stone.

If Musk is right, it's not weaseling out of contract.

Phone numbers in the US. In other parts of the world, they're longer.

Us and Canada, remember we (Canada)helped invent the phone systems

So?

And all US numbers begin with 555, or so I’m lead to believe.

It's absolutely true. All US numbers are 555-xxxx. You can see this in any US movie or TV show, which we know to be very accurate.

Similarly, any time an American car has a fender-bender, or at least one of its wheels leaves the ground, it explodes in a massive fireball.

That's what's really holding me back from getting an American car. Just fearing that somebody might hit my car and then it's over.

Independent of Hollywood, some American cars just might do that. Maybe not in such an impressive manner, but I've been through so many Dodge transmissions and Ford's reputation here is even worse.

joking aside, the 5M figure probably came from targeting like this, such as choosing a few area codes with high tech populations and testing the ~10M phone numbers for each area

International phone numbers can be up to 15 digits, but in most places the rules narrow them down further.

For example in the UK the country code is 44, all mobile phone numbers start with 7, with 9 digits after that.

5,000,000 seconds is about two months. The attackers simply might not have had enough time to check more numbers than that.

(Assumption: They were checking only one number per second, either to avoid detection or because they were rate-limited.)

What percent of mobile numbers do you think are associated with twitter accounts? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out they had to try 500M or more numbers to find 5M accounts.

We'd need to actually test it. But I believe the finding ratio would be even lower than 1 in 100.

As of Dec 2020 only 2.3% of active accounts had any form of 2FA enabled [1]

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/twitter-revea...

Maybe they should store salted hashes of phone numbers.

The purposes of phone numbers:

1. Verify you are a not a bot: no need to store anything except TRUE once verified.

2. 2FA - well use something better than SMS, but if you must, store the hash, and make me enter my number for the 2FA each time. Compare with hash and then send SMS.

Downvote explainer?

Didn’t downvote and think your idea is reasonable, but worth noting that twitter currently needs unhashed phone numbers for:

- Account search during password recovery (lets users search for their account by phone number): https://twitter.com/account/begin_password_reset

- User discoverability and account recommendations (users who upload their address books can find others by phone number, users who share their number can be found by others): https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/account-suggestion...

Hashing numbers has other implications, like support impact (some folks don’t know their own phone number), preventing the ability to offer SMS updates in countries that need it (or to reactivate that feature in national emergencies for countries that SMS support was pulled from), as well as making potential marketing, data mining, satisfying legal requests, and future feature development harder.

So your suggestion is a good one for a privacy-conscious service that doesn’t already depend on (or that is unwilling to relinquish) unhashed numbers, but it probably isn’t in the nature of twitter to seek to protect user data at the expense of existing or future features, even after leaks like this.

Not to mention that only having salted hashes will make it harder for them to link your advertising profile with other data brokers.

Non-geeks dislike the hassle of 2FA enough as it is, having to enter their phone number every time too sounds like it would hurt adoption quite significantly.

With technology like FIDO Passkey built into newer phones (both iOS and Android), I see passwordless multi-factor attested auth becoming the standard for most services very soon. Then, users will have to do even less to get more security.

It's a solved problems that you never confirm or deny the registration of an identity (like email or phone) for your service.

Bad login? "Not a valid user/pass combo"

Password recovery? No matter what email or phone provided, simply say "If the email matches our records, we will send a recovery link".

Until the UX team comes in and demands "better error messages".

Possibly, but a good org will empower security teams to make that call and collaborate with UX on a safe compromise.

What about new user sign up? Most systems will tell you if an email address has already been registered (and it seems hard to get round that).

You can always show that message after email is verified. Don't reveal information without verifying the ownership of email or phone number.

already doable with e-mail addresses. doing this with just a phone number is not really a problem. It is a problem when you can link the phone and email. But discovering a phonenumber in itself is nothing more then pressing random numbers and see who answers?

So after forcing users to enter a phone number to continue using twitter, despite twitter having no need to know the users phone number, they then leak the phone numbers and associated accounts. Great.

But it gets worse... After being told of the leak in January, rather than disclosing the fact millions of users data had been open for anyone who looked, they quietly fixed it and hoped nobody else had found it.

It was only when the press started to notice they finally disclosed the leak.

That isn't just one bug causing a security leak - it's a chain of bad decisions and bad security culture, and if anything should attract government fines for lax data security, this is it.

The whole announcement reeks of "Stop hitting yourself!"

What scum. They had lots of chances to fix this, the first one being not collecting phone numbers in the first place. They chose to do that, and then they didn't adequately protect it, and now they're oh so very surprised that someone might be doxing their most vulnerable users.

If anyone is harmed by this, Twitter should be held liable.

didn't actually not just protect the phone numbers. They actively used it illegally to market services outside of the purpose for which the numbers were gathered

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/25/23141968/ftc-doj-twitter-...

It's not just Twitter. It happens every few months. The problem is centralized sites having "real name policies", requiring you to put your phone number and other crap: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/25/no-way-to-prevent-this-says...

Requiring a phone number is part of fraud & spam prevention. Maybe you'd make a different tradeoff but that's not "no reason."

> The FTC says Twitter induced people to provide their phone numbers and email addresses by claiming that the company’s purpose was, for example, to “Safeguard your account.

> ...

> But according to the FTC, much more was going on behind the scenes. In fact, in addition to using people’s phone numbers and email addresses for the protective purposes the company claimed, Twitter also used the information to serve people targeted ads – ads that enriched Twitter by the multi-millions.

source: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/05/twitter-p...

So you're right, it wasn't for "no reason", but it also wasn't just for fraud and spam prevention, security, or any of the other lies Twitter told users.

Exactly. I don't have an issue with this if I know they're not using it to farm shit off of me.

But then again, they wouldn't make much money otherwise.

it adds a small cost to creating sockpoppets but it adds much larger value in having personal data for targeted ads

like my sibling said, twitter was dishonest to their users how the phone number was to be used

if it's just to prevent bot signups, why keep it on file at all?

They no longer use it for ads, so the value now is just fraud and security.

> if it's just to prevent bot signups, why keep it on file at all?

I mean, you need the actual number for 2FA. I guess maybe you could hash it after some amount of time just for blocking bots? You couldn't just discard it or one number could create unlimited bots.

They might use it in ranking posts presented to you. Or deciding where yours rank.

There’s more to sorting than just ads, security and fraud.

Multiple companies have been caught using information for ads that they said they wouldn't, and Twitter have already proven that they're not trust worthy

As someone that chooses not to own a cell phone, I am often written off as collateral damage in this type of thinking.

I pay about $0.2 for a working phone number instantly via API. Or pennies for packs of aged accounts. Do you actually think that stops anything?

I know the answer is money in politics, SV culture, etc. But it's near certainty twitter will continue as they do in and 2 weeks everyone will move on.

Maybe they get a small boo-boo in the form of a symbolic fine, mangers scramble for a bit, and then the whole thing happens again and again.

Why is this?

Twitter is vulnerable, most vulnerable of the big social media sites it seems. The Musk deal has fallen through, and it seems like Musk was not the only one to lose confidence in Twitter. It could easily go the way of Myspace. How many users does Myspace have these days? Active users

Because twitter users care more about the convince twitter provides than they do about the risks their privacy and security as a result of using twitter. I suspect most have no idea what the risks are or have some very limited idea of some of them. Maybe if they had a better understanding of the risks they'd close their accounts and move to something new, but I doubt there be enough of them to cause twitter to invest in securing the unnecessary amounts of data they collect.

This sort of thing will only be fixed when we hold companies accountable for failing to protect customer data through regulation with many rows of sharp teeth.

>Why is this?

Because non-twitter users don't give a fuck. And also, twitter users don't give a fuck.

Discord is also like this and it drives me nuts.

They also refuse voip numbers. I am now at 20 back and forth emails with Discord support explaining I do not own a cell phone. They are seriously suggesting I buy one just to use Discord.

I've seriously considered buying burner phones like a goddamn drug dealer for bullshit like this.

Burn phone as a service.

Cell phone numbers require KYC in almost all countries so they put people that require anonymity at risk.

Yeah. I used to live in a semi-rural area with no mobile phone coverage, and the insane level of disbelief from places when you tell them "I have no mobile phone" was a real problem. Including banks, and other utilities. :(

Maybe there needs to be some sort of law that prohibits this sort of thing.

In the meantime, Discord has been added to my "do not recommend" list.

Perhaps if you paid for discord. I happily pay for nitro because I see value in supporting discord. Still had to give them my number despite already paying them. I'd be happy about that sort of regulation.

I usually don't do ads, however there is a tool called SMS pva where you can rent phone numbers specific for services for a one time confirmation. You usually get a working one on first try.

I can't even count how many companies suggested that I should 'just get a phone number' to use their service.

I have seen too many services that ask phone number for account recovery purposes and then end up using it for other purposes for which the user didn't consent. Given how insecure SMS OTP is, I try not to enable that if I can avoid it. Then, on top of it, bugs like this make the service behave like a globally accessible open reverse-directory of mobile numbers to names.

How is twitter notifying users? Has anyone posted screenshots of this notification? I want to know where this notice will appear.

Not defending them but I think a major reason why Twitter (and for example Gmail nowadays) is asking for phone numbers is to decrease spam accounts (which is of course a good thing in itself).

How did they arrive at phone numbers? What other options did they try. It’s too easy to give companies a pass “because spam”

As I said, not defending them. They are likely doing dozens of other things as well. But using phone numbers is a quite effective method of hindering spam/bot account creation - in most countries in Europe at least getting a prepaid SIM requires ID nowadays. Not that Twitter would go as far as to inquire ownership records of phone numbers... but/so you could still go and buy 100 SIM cards if you wanted to, but it'd be way more expensive than just spawning new email addresses.

No spammer ever buys sim cards in store with ID. 5sim.net apparently has direct SS7 access and nearly infinite numbers and offers bulk purchases for receiving SMS. Even for countries like Germany, where ID authentication is mandatory to get a phone number. They have thousands of +49 numbers.

Costs only a few rubles. If you convert it to euros it’s between 1-10 cents, depending on the service and country.

The bottom line is: IDs for sim cards are useless.

Oh, that's interesting. I wonder how they get past regulation in countries like Germany as you said. I'd assume they'd have to be registered as an official operator there?

PS. I wasn't aware of SS7, reading up on it now.

Isn't this the second or third time for Twitter to have this exact same flaw? From 2020: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/twitter-uncovers-secur...

I might be confused; this is a very old feature of Twitter that does have an opt out. Maybe this new disclosure is the opt out didn't work? https://help.twitter.com/en/safety-and-security/email-and-ph...

It's a different problem, but this year Twitter also got a $150M fine for illegally using the phone numbers they demand from users for marketing purposes. https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/25/23141968/ftc-doj-twitter-...

We consistently have to go through Data protection practices, and limit the purpose of what the data collected can be used for. This seems like either a blatant miss in process, or willful ignore where $150m is under the EXPECTED value of the rewards through marketing

I think you will see more of this class of attack.

Lots of companies have various 'forgot my username'/'forgot my password'/'trying to sign up for a new account with a new email address but existing phone number'/'add a friend by email or phone' flows. It's very easy to accidentally leak some info that shouldn't be leaked while implementing such a flow, since you are peering into the users database querying by email/phone/other identifier while the user hasn't properly authenticated yet.

Yes. The proper way to implement this flow is to ask for the information, and then present the exact same result screen regardless of the actions taken. Any additional information or action should be done exclusively through the contact information you have on record.

And making sure constant time on the response. Otherwise the slower response likely corresponds to a real phone number if the backend synchronously did more actions, such as sending a recovery email. The backend would need to be really slow however in order for a strong enough signal for this to be useful.

Still it’s so much better to have the binary information of whether or not an account exists with that information than exactly which account it is.

No, the binary information too is a privacy concern. For example, one could enter a coworker's phone number to confirm that the coworker has a 4chan account. This isn't good.

> If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account, we understand the risks an incident like this can introduce and deeply regret that this happened. To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.

First time I've heard a company actually say this. It's obvious to people who understand a bit about tech and security, but not obvious to the layperson. Twitter actually deserve a tiny amount of credit for giving practical advice that reduces adversity for users in the event of a breach.

Except for a long time they shut down accounts without a phone number under the pretense of "suspicious activity". For some reason, these suspicions could be immediately allayed only by providing your phone number.

Being forced to do something and later being advised not to do that thing out of deep concern for my well-being? Yeah, that's the Twitter UX vibe: the most self-regarding, passive-aggressive person you know, in software form.

No, that's just shifting the blame onto the user. If they are asking for something as sensitive as a mobile number, then they need to protect it properly.

They ask for a mobile number to verify you're a real human, then they say "Ha it's your fault you gave us a sensitive mobile number". 99.9% of users only have one mobile, and have no idea how to get an alternate number, so they just give the number they have.

> that's just shifting the blame onto the user.

Even so, it's the first time I've seen a company actually imply to the public in plain English that they can't protect private info, rather than maintain a facade of security that doesn't actually exist.

As you point out though, if Twitter requires a phone number to sign up and 99.9% of users use their personal number, then Twitter are basically saying "our security sucks and if you want an account you have no alternative...".

Some interesting corollaries:

- Are there any services that will sign up to twitter on behalf of users? (and would they work or would it be merely shifting trust from Twitter to a potentially less trustworthy party?)

- I wonder if Twitter could consider not requiring personal info at sign up so as to avoid this dark UX

- Is there a 10 minute mail for phone numbers?

No. That’s not practical advice. Twitter is gaslighting us. You can’t use Twitter without a phone number. They require it.

Combine the advice with the fact that a phone number is required and you get the practical advice: don’t use twitter.

I signed up for twitter a couple weeks ago to follow some ukraine folks. They didn't require a phone number and just double checking my account doesn't have one.

They require it most of the time, and not always at first. Do anything remotely controversial, like retweeting a non-conformist, and they likely will.

I spent years being extremely controversial on twitter. Account is still active and does not have a phone number linked.

So you have a well-established account from years ago that doesn't have a phone number. Congrats. Now try to get a new account to protect your identity.

Two days ago, I've tried to create an account tied only to an email. During account creation, the wizard suddenly inserted an additional step and required my to enter a phone number.

I realise though that this is possibly an anti-spam measure (which I'm in favour of), since I've connected through Tor when creating the account. But this procedure stands in stark contrast to the advise given in the article.

If they actually cared they would make that statement in bold at the time they ask for your phone number and email address.

Twitter often FORCED users to enter a valid phone number by locking accounts, and then verified if it was active in comparison to accounts. To this day there is no way to remove the phone number or disassociate it with an account. Please do not oversimplify the offense, it does not do justice to the cited issues involved.

Perhaps Twitter needs to make it easier to create accounts anonymously and stop virtue signaling (i.e suspend accounts created over Tor onion-service)

With pseudonymous usage of public services information minimisation to maintain operational-security against private user-data being disclosed by external hackers or rogue insiders is a mantra that needs to be followed religiously.

I’m six months in and they haven’t asked for a phone number yet. I dread the day when they do. This is where proficiency in the Twilio API comes in handy.

Don't you still have to use an actual phone number when you sign up for Twilio?

If you trust twilio security policy you can defer the weakness of Twitter policy in favor of the strength of twilio.

when I started liking "too many" tweets I got hit with it and my mobile carrier (canada btw) refused to deliver txt msgs from Twitter so I could never get verified.

Created and accessed over Tor or a clearnet connection?

Lucky you. I can't create another twitter account as my number is on a network unreachable by their SMS system. Worst of both worlds for me as when that number was on another network they could verify. So leaked number that I cannot even use to verify a second business account :-(.

That's crazy. I can't remember the last time I wasn't straight up locked within 2 minutes of my first login.

Guess Linux users are bad, or whatever makes them trigger each f*ING time.

Virtue signaling? Preventing completely anonymously accounts doesn't seem to fit that colloquial definition of that, I always assumed it meant taking an action simply for social signalling, that has no benefit to you otherwise.

How about the fact Twitter recently launched an official onion-service yet it is claimed by users when attempting to create an account with email over it the account is locked for 'abuse' within short order?

I certainly understand why you want to use Tor to create a Twitter account, I guess the disconnect is you seem to feel it is fundamentally and obviously wrong to prevent this, but it does seem fairly clear why you'd offer a service to allow logins yet not signups. And in any case, can't speak to why an individual account got banned

I believe this is the vulnerability reported to Twitter which awarded $5000 from its bug bounty program.

https://hackerone.com/reports/1439026

$5k seems embarrassingly low so something with such horrendous impact. Potentially allowing for doxing, and because phone numbers are the lynchpin for many 2FA and consumer-facing telco security is generally lax, total user hijacking across multiple platforms. What an absolute disaster.

if the disclosure and fix time is half a year, a blackhat is now able to both claim the bug bounty and sell the day zero exploit

I have found many far more serious bugs, even at larger companies, that have paid me under $500. No one feels security researchers time is even worth that of the internal engineers creating the bugs.

Crypto bounties pay quite well; https://immunefi.com/

Besides impact, $5K also doesn't make sense when compared to employee compensation.

Thanks for sharing this link. Twitter should've shared it in their post...

Anyone have any idea how many of these bounties are collected by people who actively look (seems like a hard way to make a living) vs. say people with some knowledge who stumble across the issue and wouldn't take the time to properly report, otherwise (might convince me to take a couple of hours)?

Turkish law authorities have abused Twitter's login system in the past several years. If an anonym Twitter account was critisizing Erdoğan they were trying to log in, try to reset the password, choose phone number and then Twitter was showing last two digits of the phone number.

They also have list of known people who were critisizing the Erdoğan publicaly but without any bad words, unable to open a criminal case agains that person.

Then they were matching probable phone numbers (last two digits) from Twitter with these knnown people'phone numbers. If there was a match (last two digits) they opened a criminal case.

And then that person was being visited by police officers in the morning, arrested for several hours, then he had to attend hearings for 3 years, like once evry 4 months. Also he had to hire a lawyer, for 5 minimal salaries.

At the end he probably wins the case if he is not the owner of that Twitter account, and Erdoğan pays around 1x minimal salary to defendant's lawyer.

Pretty disgusting they don't have a thing to check if they leaked my personal information, which lets not forget they screamed and stamped their feet to force me to hand over in the first place.

I never wanted to give you my phone number, Twitter. You demanded it.

Pretty disgusting they don't have a thing to check if they leaked my personal information

From the linked notice, fwiw: "We will be directly notifying the account owners we can confirm were affected by this issue."

Interesting how just throwing the 5M figure in the title changed everything for this post: https://u.ale.sh/some-accounts.png

Well yeah. Some accounts could be two. If I see language like that in a headline, I pretty much ignore it. It's like when I see the word "may" in a headline. "New wonder drug may cure cancer." That isn't even news.

> In January 2022, we received a report through our bug bounty program

> This bug resulted from an update to our code in June 2021

Does this mean the problem existed for 7 months and nobody at Twitter noticed until they received a bug report?

That's not unusual for a security bug; it's not like this stopped people from using the app in a way that they'd loudly complain about or that would show up in metrics.

Given they didn't think it was exploited they must have pretty poor logging and analytics around that part of their infrastructure. Someone managed to abuse it millions of times and they didn't know about it even after they'd fixed it and knew exactly where to look for abuse.

Curious what kind of logs/analytics would you add and watch to catch something like this?

You should notice a spike in any request logging metric if someone exploits this.

Depends on the normal usage, if someone was doing this across unique ips and slow enough that the usage change may be say 1% it wouldn't be noticed.

A more sophisticated system that could look at the ips in use and compare to previously used ips for the accounts would notice something.

Cleaning house before due diligence.

I said this before years ago about Signal, Robinhood and Coinbase [0] and right now it's 2022 and SMS 2FA is still being used despite SS7 attacks, SIM swapping, one-click zero-day SMS attacks as found in Pegasus and sophisticated SMS phishing attacks. [1]

Really. One needs to think about logging into any service that requires ONLY Phone number 2FA and this should be a wake up call.

Twitter really should get a massive multi-million dollar fine for this breach.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29264937

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32385362

Can we have a proper postmortem about this please, with information about the exact process that was required to obtain this information?

> We take our responsibility to protect your privacy very seriously and it is unfortunate that this happened.

Patently not seriously enough.

It's always hilarious: Whenever any company is caught not taking X seriously, the first thing they do is issue a press release that starts with "Here at COMPANY, we take X very seriously!"

A story an old coworker of mine often told was about the CEO at a previous company he had worked for. This guy was apparently pretty scummy in general, but one time he got threatened with a lawsuit for sexually propositioning his secretary.

He settled that issue with an under-the-table payout, but the first thing he did after that was to send out a stern memo to all staff warning them that "we will tolerate ABSOLUTELY NO sexual harassment at this company!"

Reminds me of how certain spam emails will proudly proclaim: This is not spam!

You can pretty much read a list of company values to find out exactly the things they do only for show.

The companies I've worked for have always ignored any stated values as soon as it costs them money or gets in the way of making money. Which is, you know, always.

here is the bug report...

https://hackerone.com/reports/1439026

> When we learned about this, we immediately investigated and fixed it. At that time, we had no evidence to suggest someone had taken advantage of the vulnerability.

> In July 2022, we learned through a press report that someone had potentially leveraged this and was offering to sell the information they had compiled. After reviewing a sample of the available data for sale, we confirmed that a bad actor had taken advantage of the issue before it was addressed.

Yikes. Sounds like they either didn't dig deep enough to see if it was exploited or they don't keep records long enough to be sure.

Probably the latter - all companies operating in the EU have had short (ie. 30 days) retention policies on anything user-identifiable (ie. http logs) for a while now.

But if they didn't keep sufficient logs, they should have alerted the users back then, not now.

AFAIK there is an exception for security purposes. They could be hashing or "anonymizing" the IPs and keep the data longer.

No that's not valid at all! You must remove any trace of your ability to backwards engineering the IPs. Hashing isn't sufficient since it's so easy to run over the whole IPv4 space. This is one of the trade offs.

You can if the hash collides within the IPv4 address space; ie it's a hash of less than about 16 bits. Enough to let your roughly see if something fishy is going on but you can't reverse engineer to any specific IP, only a set of 64 thousand.

That isn't good enough. By taking that hash and old request data combined with your current request logs it's enough to de-anonymization a significant portion of those logs making you not in compliance.

Data from the past few days we do have a legitimate interest in; protecting our network. If someone is spamming us we need to be able to find out who did it and the only way to do that is deanonymized logs to begin with. Atleast in my workplace we have worked with the DPA to ensure that we are in compliance and there is no issue in keeping around 7 days of IP logs without further anonymization. All or long term logs are hashed below the bit minimum, and that can't be paired with old request data as easily since we strip all but major version identifiers from User Agents, for example.

Wouldn't salting mitigate this?

If something uniquely identifies someone, it's considered a PII and a salted (but still useful) hash of the IP address is that. At least under GDPR. That means you will need to throw away the salt and have different salt for every instance. At that point, you might as well replace with a random string, and that isn't very useful.

"In the context of the European GDPR the Article 29 Working Party has stated that while the technique of salting and then hashing data “reduce[s] the likelihood of deriving the input value,” because “calculating the original attribute value hidden behind the result of a salted hash function may still be feasible within reasonable means,” the salted-hashed output should be considered pseudonymized data that remains subject to the GDPR."

Under CCPA, I think that is enough, HOWEVER, business must implement business processes that specifically prohibit reidentification. So again, not useful at all in this case.

The question should be is IP address a PII or not. Under CCPA and GDPR it is, but only if it “identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.”

You could probably make the argument that you need to store http logs with cleartext IP addresses for more than 30 days for operational security and fraud detection reasons. I would certainly consider 180+ days of cleartext IP addresses quite necessary to be able to react to any security or abuse incidents.

For security reasons IP addresses needs to be available in plain text. There is no time limit for how long time you can store the data, but you need to be able to motivate why.

AFAIK there are exceptions for many purposes, taxes, law enforcement, "critical business functions", etc of the 30 day window. Tax records, which can be quite PII and personal, need to be kept for ~7 years in the US for instance. Anything that needs to go to law enforcement stays around until the court case is over which can be longer.

"We have no evidence that this was exploited" is a standard psychological trick they pull in vulnerability announcements to give an unfounded impression that it hasn't been exploited.

I always wonder who "we" refers to in that usage, legally speaking. Does it refer only to a subset of employees / board members who are authorized to speak for the company? Because then even if someone analyzing logs sees something damning, if middle management is trained to stop that knowledge from reaching the top, then those speaking for the company can continue saying "we" didn't know it.

I have 100% seen this happen.

really? what do you mean 'middle management is trained to keep that from getting to the top'? intentional malfeasance?

where I work people are trying their best but dealing with complex systems, memories, and methods of communication. because of this, security issues are sometimes missed, sometimes poorly communicated, and sometimes poorly remediated.

Almost all companies operate with an extremely low level of trust and most places are blame, shame, and ultimately game the system all the way down.

Hiding something often takes years to uncover and by then management has moved on, maybe even to their second company!

Probably not 'trained' as much as 'heavily incentivized'. Nobody wants to be the messenger that gets shot for bringing bad news. Much easier to cover up and tell the big boss what they want to hear as long as you can.

It means silos and information hiding are baked in — as a matter of corporate culture — at least in part to preserve the option of plausible deniability for statements like Twitter’s.

I guess to poster's claim, "I have seen this happen" is an existential claim, not a universal one.

Fwiw, I've ended up being "middle management" at a large company, with deep technical background, and I'm trained and incentivized to report, escalate, inform, communicate, share, and otherwise ensure its addressed up the bloody wazoo. I get slapped on the hand for not communicating / informing enough, never for communicating too much. Over 2 decades, I've never seen my executives try to cover something. "Manage the narrative", sure, but that's largely about how they craft a sentence, not about not reporting.

However, I have also witnessed corporate culture in other places (as embedded consultant) where each layer is terrified of layer above, and each layer is heavily punished for reporting "bad news". They were institutionally set up to fail project deployment as risks are not escalated and they proudly plunge forward. They're not sure much top-down knowingly obstructed to hide stuff, as much as electroshock therapied that it's a bad experience. Taking the most cursory log at the most basic logs and saying "whee, no evidence of exploit!!" Would be par for the course :-/

This certainly happens. If you speak to a corporate lawyer about a potentially sensitive issue, they will encourage you to use the phone, don't put anything in writing, and don't tell anybody especially not higher ups in the company, until you sort things out with them first.

> don't tell anybody especially not higher ups in the company

As a non-lawyer, that sure sounds like sketchy advice, even beyond the rest.

How so?

Seems both ethically questionable and maybe not the best strategy for the individual if they're being instructed to keep information to themselves instead of passing it up the chain in the company. Is that intended to keep just that employee responsible for whatever mess?

> Seems both ethically questionable

Right, but how so? A person or company can get into trouble with things being written down or made known to others. Having a lawyer consider it first is legally prudent and is entirely reasonable and common advice given out to any person (don't speak to police/regulator/other party/internet/newspaper/etc before consulting your lawyer). If you think that's ethically sound advice for a person, then what changes the calculus for a corporation?

> and maybe not the best strategy for the individual if they're being instructed to keep information to themselves instead of passing it up the chain in the company. Is that intended to keep just that employee responsible for whatever mess?

Probably less instructed to keep it to yourself, more encouraged to stick to "official" reporting channels, and then when you do that or come into contact with such issues by other means, more encouragement to use the phone.

And it completely depends on what it is as to the intention I guess. Initially so that the lawyers are able to consider and advise. But sure you aren't paying the lawyer so they are only taking care of your interests so far as that coincides with the company's interests. So if you had a concern that you would be responsible for a legal problem, or are a victim of a criminal or civil legal matter from the company or another person in it, then I would say you should consider discussing that with your own lawyer.

Tech needs regulation like the finance industry in this regard. Regulation that can push responsibility for breaches up the chain. There must be ways to escalate and if something is seen and reported but not acted on, then liability goes upwards. CEO's in Finance and Banking do A LOT of compliance work and it does catch a lot of problems.

"an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"

Isn't that taught in..uh..I dunno, middle school science class?

Just because you don't see the rabbit, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

No, that's insane. That means I can just tell people you might have raped someone, I don't have any evidence but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

https://medicine.uq.edu.au/article/2019/04/you-look-do-not-f...

That's why I referred to it as a psychological trick.

They should be open and forthcoming about their level of confidence, instead of using the least worrying language they can offer while remaining technically correct.

It doesn't have to be a psychological trick. Sometimes you don't actually have evidence it was exploited - at which point what are you meant to say?

Well, “after investigating by <insert actual efforts taken here>, we were unable to find evidence it was exploited” would be a good start, as it would indicate some effort was put into disproving the hypothesis.

I'm 100% certain they did put in actual effort. If you're so keen on knowing, there's a form at the bottom you can use to ask them.

Then they should share a bit about what they researched and how confident they are one way or another.

Seems like a fair expectation to have, to me.

It provides close to nothing, because it doesn't indicate whether there was no evidence because there could be no evidence - you keep no logs - or whether there was no evidence in spite of the fact there definitely should be if it was exploited because of copious information kept that would show it.

’We have no proof this wasn’t exploited’

"we have no way of knowing" is a much more informative statement than "we have no evidence", but it belies fallibility on the part of the speaker.

"We have no way of knowing" may not be correct statement. There could always be a way to know that you may have missed. It would be inhuman to claim "we have no way of knowing" in circumstances like this.

Fair enough, perhaps to be more specific they could say "we have not kept sufficiently detailed logs to determine what happened"

“We have no evidence” strongly implies some sort of extensive forensic dance was performed, and was fruitless. “We have no way of knowing” sounds much more like epistemological resignation. “Evidence” is a pretty loaded word to use.

I mean in practice what it tends to mean is the logs only had a 3 month ttl so really could be either way. "no evidence" implies there is at least a place there could have been evidence, they looked, and didn't find any, which is a weak but nonzero update towards it having not happened. It would be nice if they clarified exactly what they checked.

> "no evidence" implies there is at least a place there could have been evidence, they looked, and didn't find any

Yeah I'd never assume that any of that is true. Sure, there probably are ways twitter could find out if something has been being exploited like evidence in server logs or new batches of accounts showing up for sale on the black market, but I wouldn't trust that they looked for them, or that they looked very hard, or that the person making press statements was told about it either way.

If a company has a financial incentive to not find information it's weird to assume they'd seriously look or be trusted to be honest about what they found.

It would be more honest to say "We aren't able to determine whether it was exploited" which could better brace potentially impacted users for the possibility they might be affected.

This is a relatively benign case but the same language is used in other breaches when people should be taking measures like freezing their credit or reviewing financial transactions.

How can anyone make any assertions about unknown unknowns?

It's one thing to say "My car was stolen", and another to declare "I am unable to determine if it's en route to the Taliban."

That isn't a reasonable analogy in any way.

The only thing that could happen with the data would be that it is exploited.

The only thing that happens to stolen cars is not going to the taliban.

These are not even similar in nature. They aren't saying "the data was stolen". They also aren't saying "the data was available for exploit we are unable to determine if that occured."

What if they never looked for evidence of unauthorized access? They wouldn't have any!

This is the same as modern science and medicine frequently using this academic phrase, no evidence, when what they mean is that there has been no investigation.

You can make positive assertions though. E.g. attack might have been simple in which case it's possible to produce indicators that cover 100% of variants. Or it could have been complex and indicators either don't cover every possible attack or they produce large number of false positives.

Another thing to mention would be how long in the past you were able to look. E.g. in this case they have found out that the bug was introduced in 2021, were they able to inspect logs covering all of that period or did they only had limited logs/other evidence so it's impossible to know whether anyone used this opportunity or not?

It's more like saying "I left my car in a shady neighborhood unattended for 72 hours with the doors open and the key left in the ignition but I haven't been keeping track of the millage or the fuel level so I'm not aware that anyone used it while I was away."

Nothing would have stopped someone from using it. Probably best to assume that they have.

Its not an unknown unknown. If there's a vulnerability and you're a hot target, you know there's a decent chance of getting exploited.

How about we don’t use terse language and a short blog post to describe a complex thing and instead talk about what happened, what you did to investigate, WHY you couldn’t determine if it was exploited, and what the heck you intend to do about it? How about some facts and transparency? How about some real honesty?

> instead talk about what happened, what you did to investigate, WHY you couldn’t determine if it was exploited, and what the heck you intend to do about it?

This will be read by optimistically 1% of people, the rest will just catch the summary. This way, you at least get to write the summary.

"At this time, there is no obvious evidence of malicious activity"

The phrasing is a bit more specific.. "At that time, we had no evidence.."

It could also mean "oh I spent five minutes looking into it and didn't see any evidence"

thats a lawyered up comment

As are most PR statements by companies when discussing breaches publicly.

The burden of proof should fall on them to demonstrate that it wasn't exploited.

Otherwise, the reasonable thing to do is to assume that it was exploited, because they have no evidence to show that it wasn't.

The phrase is a psychological trick because it creates the illusion that the burden of proof falls on the other side.

You can't prove a negative.

In which case, the second paragraph applies.

But then you might as well just assume everything is compromised, at all times, even if there's been no announcement. They could just not be telling you.

Which is maybe not the worst strategy, but it's going to be pretty exhausting.

I'd suggest that instead we should just expect and enforce a certain amount of openness and honesty from companies when they fuck up in this way, so we can make informed decisions.

Well, yes - this is the dilemma which is not resolved with empty platitudes, even though "you can't prove a negative."

In the US and elsewhere, there are already some penalties for covering up a problem, and they should be expanded commensurately with the potential harm.

There is no greatest prime number.

If there were, call it p, and let q = Π(P), P∈N:P is prime (Eratosthenes showed this is computable)

Then q+1 % 1 modulo every lesser prime, meaning q+1 is prime, and p is thus not the greatest prime.

There you go. We have just proven a negative.

Other purpose than being a psychological trick, what purpose could pointing out the lack of evidence at the time have? Instead they could have written something like "We found the problem in 2021 and promptly fixed it. We first learned that it has been exploited in 2022."

No, that's a normal statement when there's no evidence something occurred.

"I have no evidence he murdered someone"

As opposed to

"He might have murdered someone, or not, I just don't have any evidence"

"It's possible he murdered someone I don't have any evidence though"

"I don't have any evidence he murdered someone but that doesn't mean he didn't, I'm just asking questions"

That is not a normal statement if it is your company's fault the question even came up.

"We left a giant tub filled with cyanide completely unsupervised in front of our door for months. We have no evidence that it was used to murder someone."

Has an entirely different sound to it, no?

More like the tub was filled with water and "we have no evidence it was used to drown someone (but also we didn't check for floating bodies)"

"We left our gun outside, unsecured, but no one has complained they were shot with it and we didn't detect any fingerprints on it when we finally noticed it wasn't locked up properly"

Now you're claiming they didn't investigate properly which a completely different situation that you also don't have evidence for.

or: "keeping fine grained indexed API logs around for months on end is too expensive so we threw out the body with the bathwater"

How does it have a different sound?

"We left a giant tub filled with cyanide completely unsupervised in front of our door for months. We have no evidence that it was used to murder someone."

No one would say that second sentence, if you don't have evidence of something you don't state that because of the set of objects and events that didn't happen is infinite.

"We left a giant tub filled with cyanide completely unsupervised in front of our door for months. We have no evidence that someone accidentally fell into it, an animal died in it, it was used in a bank robbery, someone's cell phone slipped it in............"

"That person owns a gun legally, we have no evidence that he used it to murder someone"

Why not

What was your train of thought from "we made a giant mistake. We have no evidence of consequences, yet." to "that person owns a gun legally"?

It doesn't tell you whether they have actively investigated the incident though. And if they did, how thorough they were.

Suppose Twitter did all it could to investigate and found no evidence. What would you rather have Twitter say in that case ?

"We are unable to determine if the vulnerability was exploited."

How hard they looked is not of any consequence if they can't tell it wasn't exploited.

Saying there is an absence of evidence (of a leak) isn't useful by itself unless they also indicate whether that is evidence of absence (of a leak). I.e., they should indicate whether it is likely that they would have caught it if a leak had occured (e.g., via extensive logging).

Provide some level of detail on how they looked for evidence. "We have no evidence" could mean "we didn't bother looking for evidence", or "we looked extensively for evidence, but didn't find any." In fact, the company has an incentive not to keep logs or collect evidence specifically so they can truthfully claim they don't have any evidence of a breach

How many man hours they spent investigating would be good.

"We assume it was exploited and you should too."

Absolutely. That said, it's very very hard sometimes to prove a negative.

The database just dropped itself automagically

I wonder, if you destroy all the evidence this was exploited, can you still claim you don't have any evidence this was exploited? Asking for opinions from non-lawyers only please

To be sure, use a clean room implementation: let IT destroy all the evidence, always. Then legal can claim 'we don't have any evidence'.

source: I am not a lawyer

Works the same way with government. The "I am not aware of ..." is a great trick for when your organization is intentionally silod. The folks who get subpoenaed are left out of detailed info. It's a complete non-statement.

I could bring up examples across both sides of the isle. It's all a big game.

haha. I am a lawyer so sorry, but while you might be able to claim that, you are legally and ethically obligated to also divulge the intentional spoiling of hte evidence.

As if the people giving orders at some of these companies care about ethics... ;)

Don't currently have? Sure. The quote says "At that time, we had no evidence" so I think that would be harder to argue. You could maybe make the case the statement means: At that specific moment we didn't have any evidence because we already destroyed it. But it certainly implies they mean they had not found any before that point in time.

Yes, potentially a euphemism for "we did not check to see if this was exploited, and thereby have no evidence it was exploited."

It would be a lot more convincing if they said they put a team on to it to investigate extensively and didn't find anything indicating it was exploited.

Absence of evidence IS some evidence of absence if you look thoroughly. It sure isn't anything of the kind if you haven't actually tried to gather the evidence or are aware of giant holes in what you were able to gather.

It's not a trick. Incident response (not vulnerability announcement) is all about evidence. If you can't prove it, it didn't happen. They can probably stil take precautionary measures though which the announcement is part of.

You seem to believe "we had no evidence to suggest someone had taken advantage of the vulnerability" implies "we looked for any evidence of it", it doesn't, not in that case nor in any similar situation.

Or they don't monitor that system for that type of access at all and so literally don't know.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

This link is not particularly relevant, as it talks about how the phrase "no evidence" is used within a specific community and that community has little overlap with the community which writes press releases after security incidents.

Security incident response teams do not have the same strange distinction between "real" evidence and the non-published non-peer-reviewed evidence which cannot be relied on or even really mentioned.

Out of curiosity, why is it only 5M and not 500M? You would think the same vulnerability applied to every server, not just one or one cluster, if they are using automated deployments

Could be a time intensive exploit. Maybe they didn't have enough time to mine the other 455M.

The rest are bot accounts right?

Doing it slowly over time to not raise an alarm and collect the information, rather than twitter noticing a massive upticks in password resets that don’t go through?

I wonder how it affects the Musk’s case of declining to buy Twitter? Surely they concealed from him the fact of this breach?

Yes I wonder about this as well. Say Musk had good reasons to suspect some private information was at risk and Twitter kept denying anything was going on. No matter how minor the actual impact would be in the end, this would not paint Twitter in a favourable light especially in a legal battle where Musk claims Twitter held back vital information.

The page isn’t loading for me and I notice Twitter itself is either slow or not loading at all right now. I also see a spike in reported problems for Twitter on DownDetector.

It loads for me in the browser, but the app is failing to load data.

EDIT: A few refreshes shows it's slow and occasionally failing in the browser for me...

Twitter was actually down for few minutes. It just got fixed.

Archive link in case anyone is still having issues: https://archive.ph/HujUg

You know... in the last major tech bust, downsized teams working on oversized software didn't have thousands of productions services to maintain. What's a company with 10k services, and 10 languages going to do when when it comes time to patch security vulnerabilities. Or merely keep them from emerging?

Put together a ‘scrappy team’ no longer sounds professional and sustainable.

Whoever wants to get rid of anonymity on the internet will have to solve problems like this first

Until then :middle_finger:

> To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.

What? How? Twitter doesn’t allow voip numbers or any sms gateway that is not a brick and mortar teleco company that requires full ID verification.

It's amazing how many security incidents are caused by people who are bad at acting.

"We recommend not doing what we forced you to do"

It's one of the many reasons why I don't like to associate my phone number with an account for 2FA and such... Or any other information that they don't need (like name, etc...).

I think that Google recently forced most accounts to give a phone number even if you don't use 2FA (probably for ID purposes). That's one reason why I like this service: https://www.emailnator.com/, instead of using my own gmail address for signups.

Anonimity is going down the toilet really fast in the US...

I'd love if they brought back the "fail whale" for this kind of announcement.

Is there a way to know if your own account is compromised?

> We will be directly notifying the account owners we can confirm were affected by this issue. We are publishing this update because we aren’t able to confirm every account that was potentially impacted, and are particularly mindful of people with pseudonymous accounts who can be targeted by state or other actors.

So they may contact you, or may not. It would be nice if this gets added to something like haveibeenpwned

Since apparently Twitter doesn't have the logs, they should be purchasing the hacked dataset and notifying affected accounts.

This is why Managers and PMs should not be deciding priority of security betterments. I've never worked at, or heard of, a company that adequately incentivizes or takes posthoc corrective actions for EMs/PMs around long term consequences or brand threats. They're tragedies of the commons of sorts.

> "At that time, we had no evidence to suggest someone had taken advantage of the vulnerability. "

This sounds misleading or incompetent. If someone was harvesting data, then logs would indicate how many such login attempts were being made per second/minute/hour/day and the activity would spike in certain days, times, geographical areas to suggest this kind of activity is going on.

Even if the attacker was really careful spreading their activity over long periods of time & routing it via multiple geographical areas, the overall activity would show an uptick before & after the bug.

I find it highly unlikely that a company of the size of Twitter could not ascertain from their internal data that a bug like this was exploited or not.

I'm disappointed and growing hopeless about the state of software engineering at these companies that this sort of issue is not caught in engineering design documents, during development/debugging, or during code reviews. Any competent engineer should have the sensibility to have seen that the implementation they've designed or programmed leaks private information in some scenarios.

Or, perhaps the UX design team intentionally decided that mentioning the Twitter username associated with the email address would be a "helpful" piece of info to present at this point in the login/signup flow. In this case, too, the design team should have known that privacy far outweighs any potential helpfulness.

I wonder if this will be the material adverse change that lets Elon get out of buying Twitter...

Tying identity to a phone number is one of those things that solved an immediate need (2FA) but it's riddled with so many issues and concerns that the only reason we're still doing it is because the alternatives are a huge step up in complexity and user frustration.

It's why I've been relatively ok with everything Apple has been doing here. Someone needs to drag us into the modern age of authentication and it hasn't been any standards body. They can write specs all day but unless they can get players to adopt them then they're worthless. It's Netscape 3.0 all over again.

Another nail in the coffin for phone numbers? Useless for security, most calls are scams now (friends/family use other tech to communicate), and now leaked enough that everyone knows everyone's number anyway.

I thought this was going to be a tongue in cheek announcement to wit-

A chaos actor with malintent executed a social engineering attack and thereby acquired sensitive private data from several million active human accounts with the goal we believe to misclassify humans as bots and thereby thwart the actor's own publicly but impulsively stated goal of acquiring Twitter and becoming custodian of this data. This actor is still at large though we expect to see him in Delaware Chancery Court in September where he will be punished for his impulsive chaos.

>If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account, we understand the risks an incident like this can introduce and deeply regret that this happened. To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.

I'm so sick of this kind of victim blaming, you're forced to add a phone number to use twitter.

The company entity requires blaming others. It can't blame itself, otherwise stakeholder value is affected. If you want to blame anyone, blame the environment that allows these types of actions by companies, or simply stop using them.

BTW, no Twitter account is "ours". If it was, we could download everything (friends and all) and move it somewhere else. Twitter needs to take ownership of all data on their platform - user accounts included. Trying to separate them into different entities is ridiculous.

These are cogent points and I completely agree not admitting fault seems the playbook for publicly traded companies.

It’s unfolding in real-time with Tyler Technologies and we’ll have to see how it plays out. Intelligent institutional investors are poring money into a company that is responsible for leaking millions of intended to be confidential CRIMINAL RECORDS and is trying to blame JudyRecords for finding their mistake.

Again it goes to show we don’t really own anything that turns digital, and no safeguards are guaranteed. The only recourse is legal action, which is, IMHO going to bankrupt Tyler r force numerous spin offs to pay the class action results from the CA State Bar…and potentially hundreds more.[0]

The environment is one of no consequences when hiding behind a corporate banner, for most intents and purposes. Choose who you work for wisely.

[0] www.JudyRecords.com

> It can't blame itself, otherwise stakeholder value is affected.

One would think dishonestly blaming others for the consequences of their own conduct would also affect stakeholder value.

Yeah, it's shocking they would say this when they do require phone numbers in many instances.

Many unexplained instances. (Twitter will claim a prior but unspecified TOS violation but thats a dodge, rather than a justification)

No mention of that fact that 'use another phone number' is quite an expensive thing to do in countries where a phone number has an annual fee of hundreds of dollars.

Suddenly 'use twitter securely' has gone from 'free' to 'hundreds of dollars a year'. Perhaps they should announce this as a price change instead?

>countries where a phone number has an annual fee of hundreds of dollars.

Is this a thing? I've never heard of it. Where?

It's true in the USA if you stick to the big providers... Ring up t-mobile and say 'I'd like a line with 0 minutes and 0 GB of data, just to receive verification texts for Twitter' and they'll probably quote you $200 a year or so...

$120 before tax for T-mobile for 1000 minutes, 1 GB/mo.

Why the arbitrary limitation to the “big providers” - you can get a basic Tello plan with SIM for $5/month prepaid - and they’re a T-mobile MVNO so it’s a T-Mobile number.

Tracphone is the company you want for this sort of thing. A SIM costs $0.99 (requires unlocked phone of course) and you add $15 to the account to get 500 texts. (I think you can do this with cash at a place like Walmart.)

It is expensive if you need to keep the plan around, but Twitter doesn't seem to regularly send SMSes to the phone number, so you probably don't need to pay beyond the first month.

You need a plan to have a number because it's difficult/impossible to get a number allocated to you as an individual. If we assume "hundreds" means >=$200/year, then the maximum monthly payment we can have for that not to be true is $16/mo. The absolute cheapest phone plans I could find in the US that weren't for alarm systems were $15/mo on mvnos like mint. In practice, I suspect few people are paying less than $25-$30 a month, or "hundreds" a year for their numbers.

There are no prepaids? Which country do you have in mind?

Prepaid phone plans in the USA charge you a monthly rate just like subscription plans do. They may also charge you for usage, though that appears to have fallen off compared to the past.

Some years ago I looked into prepaid pricing and determined that it was significantly more expensive than a subscription plan at even my almost-never-use-it levels of phone use. (At that time, pricing was based on (1) a reasonable per-use rate, which would have been very cheap; combined with (2) a high flat fee charged on any day you used any feature of the plan, which already nullified any price advantage; and (3) a requirement to add funding to the plan every month, regardless of whether you had an existing balance.)

Wow, the prepaid plans in your country suck.

How they work here is:

1. You need to top up by €20 at least once a year to keep your account

2. You may sign up to an offer, which will deduct a portion of a top up each month to activate the offer (e.g top up by > €20, the phone company takes €10 for unlimited texts, or €20 for unlimited data).

3. If you don't top up as required by your offer, you fall back to a state as if you had no offer

4. If you have no offer there's fixed fees of like 20c/sms and €0.50/min of calls, €2/day for 100mb of data

We used to have pre-paid plans like that in the US, but they've fallen out of favor in the last 10-15 years. They were complicated to use, and very expensive: many MVNOs had rules such has having at least one top-up a month to keep the line active, and money used to top-up had time limits before they'd expire.

Now pre-paid is often just paying for a month before usage rather than after usage. Even cheaper providers like Mint sign you up for 3 months at once, which can get expensive if all you want it for is just satisfying Twitter.

At some point it just gets ludicrous, though.

Is it reasonable for everybody to go buy "burner" phones to sign up for Twitter?

The truth is, it's stupid for Twitter to require a phone number, and it's especially stupid that they blame the user for using their real number.

In India, its not expensive at all, but every sim card is available only after you provide a copy of your national id card aka Aadhar Card.

But as the OP mentioned, you need to maintain a paid plan and activity on the SIM to keep your number from expiring. It’s neither indefinite nor free.

Yes, I meant that even if somebody who wants to keep the identity unattached to twitter (& thus not risk doxxing after twitter data leak), in India its not possible at all even if they have money to afford.

> but every sim card is available only after you provide a copy of your national id card aka Aadhar Card.

Can you not get an activated SIM off the street?

No, technically every SIM gets activated only when mobile phone provider gets the user's documents copy & a verification call comes from mobile company's service center to an existing number of yours or family (& you verify your documents details). If you don't have a existing number to reach, they make you to bring documents to official store. There is no pre activated SIM cards.

Mostly, like any other country, this happened because they found bad people were using pre activated sim cards for terrorism.

My exiting phone number is now 14 years old, same provider, prepaid. I have been required to submit updated KYC about 4 times in these years.

If you know the right providers it's about $2/month for a non-VOIP, physical SIM to receive SMS for this sort of garbage.

Would be super interested in hearing more about where you could find such a deal _with a physical SIM_. Seems far too good to be true.

Many "IOT" providers give physical numbers for almost no cost, and they provide physical SIM cards for the service. The aren't VOIP so aren't blocked by twilio, etc for use with Twitter and other services.

Any examples of providers?

Hologram.io or Twilio

These and even much smaller providers are usually known to spammers. I've had poor luck with them.

You can sign up for a Twitter account with a Twilio number? I'd be surprised

I used Red Pocket, which comes down to about 2.50/month if you buy a prepaid card on eBay: https://www.redpocket.com/plans/annual

These phone number blocks have usually been utilized by spammers in the past. A lot of them don't work.

Anyone accept Monero?

It might have some PR speak sprinkled, but it’s genuinely good advice, put more bluntly:

“We can screw up, if it’s important enough for you to stay anonymous you should get a separate phone number and email”

That is a good tip with every company. If you want better security, have less trust in the services you’re using.

This goes to what victim blaming is. Yes. It would be great if the victim lived in a better world. But sometimes extra caution could help them now without waiting for the entire world to change.

In Germany and other countries you have to show government ID to get a GSM number. Phone numbers are like bank accounts: strongly linked to official name and identity.

This advice is bullshit.

But you can abandon a number after you registered on Twitter. Doesn't help against agencies but against scrappers

Doesn't that make account takeovers easy?

My social media accounts are all disposable, so it doesn't really matter to me.

Sure. You understand how that's not necessarily the case for many other people, right?

My very recent experience contradicts this. I removed my number and was immediately locked out until I added it back.

I don't think you tell Twitter that you canceled your cell phone contract. They don't need to know.

They mean you can get a different phone number, not remove it from twitter.

Ah, I misunderstood that comment entirely. This makes more sense

There is an exceptional difference you left out. In criminal situations, the criminal is punished, there is a deterrent. What is the deterrent here? Without a deterrent, there is a moral failure.

> I'm so sick of this kind of victim blaming, you're forced to add a phone number to use twitter.

I had some old accounts that did not require a phone number.

At least until I wanted to enable TOTP 2FA.

At which point the numnuts at Twitter would not just let me "just" enable TOTP, I was forced to provide a phone number (which, to add insult to injury, for at long time they refused to accept because they would only send messages to a limited number of carriers).

And then Twitter misused authentication phone numbers for marketing: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/05/twitter-p...

And also used a sketchy service provider who was selling personal info about Twitter users to governments: https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/09/twitter-2fa-text-privacy/

Twitter has been habitually careless with user info & user privacy.

Twitter decides when to hit you with the demand for a phone number. Try sh!itposting for a couple weeks. That usually does the trick.

This may be Twitter's best anti-bot measure, although state-sponsored troll farms will likely be able to afford all the SIM cards they want and need.

Agreed but, in what jurisdiction does Twitter require phone numbers?

All of them. You don't need to provide one on sign up, but your account will be soft banned typically in a couple of hours until you provide one. So it's a requirement that they aren't forthcoming about.

I have an account that doesn’t have one and works fine. I wonder why they don’t always require it.

A year or so ago, I created an account and followed ten or so people (no tweets at that time). When I went to log in the next day, it wouldn't let me log in until I attached a phone number. As I understand it, that was a relatively common occurrence.

And, this is just one of many examples of a deep, deep dishonesty at the core of Twitter Inc's operations:

Pretending they're not requiring something when in practice, a giant proportion of their userbase faces it.

Pretending anything changes when you click 'See This Less Often' on some annoying feature.

Constantly undoing a user's preference for 'Latest' over algorithmic 'Home'.

Claiming they don't "soft-ban" but absolutely, verifiably, hiding some users' content from others who have explicitly followed them.

Implying there's some effective "appeal" process for arbitrary & often clearly erroneous moderations decisions – when instead it's just designed for coercing compliance, including the simualted "voluntary" deletion of tweets, under penalty of losing your account indefinitely.

Slurring & hiding replies with no hint of offense as "potentially offensive".

Describing tweets as "unavailable" when (often) all you have to do is click to see it - wasting users time.

Offering "Show additional replies" even when there's nothing more to show – again wasting users' time.

Twitter would actively block one time numbers. This seems like a lie.

I tried to use onoff numbers with Twitter on multiple occasions but failed to receive anything. They are being very misleading here.

-- not only do they block one time numbers - google voice numbers - etc - they claim you CAN sign up with just an email account - let you - and then 30 minutes later automatically lock your account and tell you the only way to verify it is with a number - I was setting up an account a week ago for a client and I eventually gave up - because I was sick of being lied to by their UI --

Some people claim this is the situation with the new Twitter onion-service. Sad.

Tip: If you email(anonymously ofc) twitter support that you do not have a phone number to receive the OTP for verification during account creation, they generally approve your request.

My twitter account does not have a phone number attached

They seem to be recommending that you use an unlisted phone number. That seems like a good idea.

To some privacy threats, essentially no numbers are "unlisted".

> you're forced to add a phone number to use twitter.

is that true for the desktop web client?

It was for me.

When I created an account, they blocked it 30 seconds later (before I had done literally anything) and would only unblock it upon me adding a phone number. Google suggested that this was common practice by them at the time.

Yes. They will let you sign up with just an email but after few minutes of activity your account will be locked and they will demand phone number verification.

> a publicly known phone number or email address

I don't get the definition of "publicly" here. Does it mean something on Internet, or include numbers I tell people in-person? If the former, not so many people put their number online I suppose...

You can remove your phone number after creating the account.

I really doubt it's a hard delete.

And right after you do your account will be locked

I have an account with no email address and no phone number so not sure what you mean.

I mean, originally twitter was an SMS based service. It was made for phones.

Yep, Twitter got my phone number because at the time 40404 was the only mobile interface, and half the point of the service.

> If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account

If you operate a pseudonymous account anywhere, you should always assume there's a slight possibility that one day your identity is known.

I think it's not far stretched to think that in the future, malevolent governments will have access to whatever things we may have posted and use it against us.

I have yet to add my phone number to my account. My guess is that it isn't applicable for legacy accounts circa 2008.

It can be triggered for opaque reasons. My account dates to February 2007. I was prompted for a phone number a few years and given no other options to recover the account. Burner & VOIP numbers that work for many other things, including SMS verifications, were rejected.

I suspect the reason was some rapid changes in my IP address in a short period, together with a lot of Twitter tabs open – whose constant background requests often seem to trigger, for me, some sort of Twitter-side connection-slowing. (Their own shoddy, high-weight design makes my normal usage pattern look like a DoS attack to them.)

So your style of usage, moreso than your account age, is likely for being spared their arbitrary phone-number inquisition.

Fucking vile victim blaming.

Twitter should not be requiring phone numbers, especially when they don't care enough to protect them.

This is why we should get back to protocols for communication instead of platforms.

> add a phone number

They do this to combat spammers, don’t they?

Isn't this widely known and very old trick? I'm pretty sure I even saw youtube tutorials and non-techy people discussing there is a way to find a person's twitter account by their number. This article says like it's something recent that was only available for short time and quickly fixed. Doesn't seem like that at all.

This evidence Twitter has 5.4mm actual accounts?

Could be that they have 5.4M accounts with a phone number.

Every time, it's the same story: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/25/no-way-to-prevent-this-says...

How did you arrive at the 5M figure, I didn't see the number of affected people in their post?

Same, I don't see the number in the article. Was it removed from the official Twitter post?

An older external article[1] about the hack mentions 5.4M accounts.

[1]: https://www.cshub.com/attacks/news/54-million-twitter-accoun...

Twitter by default lets you compose, but not send, a direct message to someone who doesn't follow you. Then Twitter leans on you to give them your phone number, and won't send it unless you do.

I've stopped using twitter.com for consumption of tweets and only user nitter.net now. It works most of the time. If your use case for twitter is similar to mine, read-only, it may be useful for you as well.

Facebook had a very similar information leak just a couple of years ago. It is amazing these companies seem to learn very little from each other when it comes to protecting personal information.

And look how bad it turned out for them...

Sounds like something that should have been found during pen testing.

Anyone's keeping track of Twitter's supposed promise to not use phone numbers outside of 2FA?

IIRC, this is at least a third email / phone number dataleak bug that they have.

Almost as bad as the child porn and flagrant criminality...

Almost

is this the same security issue that was used to unmask who was behind that "libs of tiktok" account?

no, I think the 'libs of tiktok' person included their personal info when registering a domain

> January 2022, we received a report

And they did not give notice to users. GDPR breach.

I would appreciate if they paid for a new phone number please...

Oh and a new identity please. Thanks.

But of course : They're sorry.

5.4mm == some

All the non-bot active user accounts

What unit is mm? Millimetres?

MM is 1 million. mm = 1 millimeter.

million (m = 1000, m * m = 1000000)

Since when? K/k = 1000, M/m = 1000000.

Also not consistently, SI units and prefixes are case sensitive.

This abbreviation is not in the article (nor is the number). And the HN headline now says "5M" which is maybe a more common abbreviation for "million".

Twitter has 2 factors. Turn it on. Then not just phone.

seems more about doxing and in this case large scale.

being able to attach identities to numbers.

as for brut forcing I'm sure they have limited attempts among other measures.

And why does anyone still use twitter? Its a cesspit and they ALWAYS have some kind of security issue going on. Nothing of this magnitude, but still.

Yay, twitter is getting better!

'some' accounts...

Thankfully most of those accounts were bots

Good.

So what you’re saying is that you discovered a vulnerability that leaked the private information of your users, said absolutely nothing for 6 months, then finally came clean, but only because you were forced to because people were selling data on the deep web.

Please take your “sorry” and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine. You don’t “take our privacy seriously”. This is utterly ridiculous and unacceptable, and in a fair world you would be punished heavily for it.

Edit: an earlier version of this comment criticised Twitter for not doing an investigation earlier to uncover the fact that a leak occurred. This accusation was based on me misreading the press report - see one of the child comments for details. I’ve removed that part of the comment.

>didn’t bother to do an investigation into whether it leaked data (which clearly is possible, because you’ve done it now)

It sounds like they confirmed the exploit by looking at the hacked data, not by a renewed search of previously available logs.

Yeah, I misread that part. Edited my comment.

The methods to scrape numbers from social media have been published on YouTube for ages now. They share those numbers publicly because they themselves run services that share user data with other companies openly... Twitter (for example) is used as an authentication service with Disqus and a few other online apps too, an online comment service which could easily save/track sensitive ID data across comments on multiple sites unwittingly to the user, so it's a really shady overreach if that is indeed the case. These numbers are gathered under the guise of security, but they are used for entirely different purposes.

I think the real fault is in them forcing users to enter this type of data to begin with, because that makes the only options to surrender your data to them or to not use the app at all.

It would be interesting to see if numbers from verified accounts were included in the leak, that would be very telling.

> How to Protect Your Account

> (...) To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.

Well, you're the ones constantly temporarily banning my account for not providing a phone number...

Strange you say that. I’m six months into my pseudonymous account and they haven’t tried to extort my phone number. It’s like they know from my behavior that I don’t want to be doxxed by Twitter Inc. I signed up using a VPN and a weird email address, and used an AD blocker.

Do they shadowban such accounts? Are you aware if your posts and comments are visible to others?

I checked. I have a few alt accounts and all my tweets and interactions are visible when I visit my profile.

And this is even when you visit the post (from someone else) which you reply to while being signed out of your account and your IP address?

Most shadow banning show the posts if visited via the profile but are invisible if viewed as replies to someone else's post or while signed out and using different IP address. Might be worth checking. Not asserting that this is the case with Twitter though.

There are many different levels of shadowban apparently. You can be excluded from being able to trend, or gain followers, or to have post visibility at all based on what I've observed. It mainly gets triggered by complaining about Twitter or a favored sponsor... Twitter considers those things censorable, but not upsetting violence and shocking pr0n for some strange reason... ugh.

I think your experience is irregular. A while back I was forced to create an account just to report an impersonator and they insta-suspended it for "suspicious behavior" until I provided a phone number. I asked around and heard uniformly "oh yea, twitter does that".

They said don't add a publicly known phone number to your account, so you have to create a Google Voice account that you'll never use except for account credentials like this. But Twitter will probably ban you for not using a real phone number. Or, you'll reuse that phone number across other accounts until one of them gets hacked and that phone number sold on the dark net, and now it's a public phone number again.

Last time I tried (last year), Twitter did not accept VoIP numbers. I tried Google Voice and Sudo (which are provisioned by Twilio).

>Last time I tried (last year), Twitter did not accept VoIP numbers

If only my phone company also had this policy!

> How to Protect Your Account

I'm thinking out loud for various other options that can be utilized: a private 256 char length key? You can also store it in a (Azure) key vault, so that it's easily accessible to you from other devices as well. I hope social media companies get open to more secure alternates, but security seems to be their after-thought.

> How to Protect Your Account

> Don't sign up.

FTFY

>If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account…we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number to your Twitter account.

Dear Twitter, We need a phone number to be able to use Twitter longer than a week otherwise we get blocked for “suspicious activity” (which is entirely bullshit - logging in from the same IP is not suspicious).

So what should we do? Go to AT&T and open a new line? Jokers.

>To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.

And yet they actually demanded I give them mine, and have repeatedly, recently demanded a confirmation.

Phone numbers are one of the worst 2fas.

Amen. Google is asking me to add 2FA to an account for work, and there's no way to do so except from phone numbers or Google Authenticator which I'd rather not use. It's the only service that doesn't let me use something like Authy for OTP.

I have the 2FA for my work account in 1Password (if that's reasonable is another discussion) so there should be a way to use something else besides Google Authenticator or phone number.

That is not entirely true. If I remember correctly, if you select the Google Authenticator as your option, it will display a QR code. You can then scan the QR code and the OTP information will be in that payload that can then be pasted into you app of choose. (How o got mine I to 1Password)

You know Google Authenticator is just an implementation of the TOTP open standard right? There are plenty of alternative apps that will give you the same number to key in...

Authy included

Totally understandable GP wouldn't know that, from what I recall of logging in to a Google account when I did that at all often (a few years ago, but relatively recently) Google does its best to hide that.

(If you want it, mine's another recommendation for Authy.)

Yeah I did not know you could use any TOTP besides Google Auth but even that that's not an option that's presented to me anymore at the moment now that I'm checking.

The nice thing about TOTP is i can put it in my password manager which makes life a whole lot more convenient. W for open standards.

If you’re on a Mac, in safari you can just right click on the QR code and set it up in keychain, then you can just auto fill from safari, no need for a third party app.

You might want to keep at least your email decoupled from a particular Hardware+OS+Browser combo.

Not if they flag you before, which is the same thing Twitter requests.

I was very pleased to discover that most of the KeePass/KDBX apps (e.g. KeePassXC) also support storing this data and generating the TOTP.

Do you have something against TOTP? Isn't it better than Authy?

Authy is a TOTP app.

Ah, i thought Authy was a service. So.. why can't OP use Authy with Google?

Google Auth is just TOTP, yet Authy is not capable of using it somehow? I'm so confused lol. I've used plenty of TOTP apps with Google.

Who knows. User error or misunderstanding perhaps. I use Authy with many Google accounts without issue.

Google will allow you to use (and they prefer, and you should too) a Security Key. I use this wherever I can. I don't Tweet, but if I did it would be secured with Security Keys. I have Facebook only inside a single contain on one machine, secured with Security Keys. And so on for many services. More services should do WebAuthn.

I hear you but they're expensive where I live. For the moment that's not an option though I'm looking into getting one at some point.

Replying to everyone who said to use Google Authenticator. I in fact did fall for the devious wording that implied no other Auth app would work but never fear, even that is not an option for my account now that I'm checking. The only available options are physical security keys (which I lack), phone numbers (which I won't disclose), and tapping a notification on an Android phone (which ties me even more into the Google ecosystem and I'd rather not pick). I'll appreciate any comments if anyone knows how to get a TOTP going with Authy for Gmail, don't assume I know everything and I'm willfully ignoring it!

2-step verification can be turned on by going to https://myaccount.google.com/ and selecting security and then "Signing in to Google". The "2-step verification" finally leads to the point where phone number is asked for enabling SMS based verification. Only after enabling SMS based verification it is possible to enable Authenticator App (TOTP) or some other options.

At least I couldn't find other way to enable TOTP i.e. first SMS.

I was just able to remove my phone number from my account settings and wandered into a Fred Sanford-level of junk data -- Twitter had me identified as a female (I'm male), had "interests" tied to me for both "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" and "Ben Shapiro" (they're most certainly not), and had my languages as "French" and "Indonesian" (I know only English). Bad digital hygiene.

Google always reverts back to Portuguese for me. No matter how many times I've changed it back. I went to Portugal for 5 days... a long time ago.

Had a similar issue with Prime Video - it kept displaying only Indian suggestions even though I only visited India for a short time. I don't remember how I corrected it.

having worked in the data industry, this sounds about right. Digital fingerprinting is certainly real, but I was way more paranoid about what I thought companies knew about me before working in the industry. the data quality across the board is dogshit. Even for the best companies doing B2B data like D&B and Zoominfo which are talked about as being better than most of the others - it's still mostly dirt.

Data right now is typically bought and sold with an expectation that most of it is crap. it's faster to buy and process 5000 dirty items that probably has a few good leads buried within it than to find leads manually / naturally or broadcast random advertising. (I left the industry in 2020 and my NDA expired in 2021)

Data quality is typically assessed at the "Does this data field have a value for this line item" level. That means data vendors are financially incentivized to make shit up about you as much as they can get away with. think about it for a second, these companies are selling themselves as the source of truth. the actual accuracy does not matter, and the better you are then the less data your customers buy. the data goes stale faster than the accuracy of the data becomes relevant

Did you like a post about a fresh baked baguette that had #french as one of the 100 tags associated with it? congrats, you're french now. it's not exactly this ridiculous, but you get my point

If you purchase a data source, how do you verify how good it is? Or do people typically just not do that?

you can verify how full it is.

there are some verification focused services - like they take a list of emails and check if they are valid email addresses. Some use fine print to say they are only validating whether or not it is of valid email address FORMATTING, and make no claim about whether or not the email will bounce. verifying if the email address actually belongs to the person it claims to is not part of the deal.

it's nearly an impossible task, because you have no actual source of truth to verify it against. So data vendor A and B give you different results for the same search - now what? you have to manually research and see whos "right" or "more recent".

even if it looks like good data, it might be stale. For example, company size, revenue, C level email addresses, etc all change over time.

so if a customer wants cleaner data - you basically charge them to pump the dataset through Mechanical Turks or upwork or something to have people try to verify things manually. Datasets can be large though and this gets expensive, so it tends to be better to just buy the crap data for cheaper and figure it out yourself

I have a conspiracy theory that these verification services are behind a lot of the phone spam today. they are just checking if your phone number is valid, they dont actually care if you answer.

> data vendors are financially incentivized to make shit up about you as much as they can get away with

Exactly this. But they can get away with basically anything. Worst case for them is they show you a premium ad you aren’t interested in. Best case is they guess correctly

Seems like they're doing a good job of keeping your identity veiled.

Can you please identify the steps to get to these interest settings?

On desktop/web:

Three-dot "More" > Settings and Privacy > Privacy and Safety > Content You See > Interests

"These are some of the interests matched to you based on your profile, activity, and the Topics you follow. These are used to personalize your experience across Twitter, including the ads you see. You can adjust your interests if something doesn’t look right. Any changes you make may take a little while to go into effect."

I don’t even know how an algorithm can tie someone to AOC and Ben Shapiro at the same time. What on earth are you browsing.

I hate politics, follow neither of those people, nor have ever knowingly clicked on content about either. I'm browsing geeky product-management tweets, '80s pro wrestling, music, and random tech.

It's gonna be fun when this happens to Microsoft.

They recently (early this year) onboarded a few million kids with the Minecraft account migration, and a lot of those new accounts will have flagged as "suspicious activity" and demanded a mobile number to verify who they are..

Some days I wish I could go without a phone number and have all my communications through an open protocol

I have wanted to create a twitter a few times now, but they refuse to let me use my account/complete my signup until I give them my phone number.

I've also wanted to join Twitter a few times now, but every time I visit, they quickly let me forget what that reason might have been

I just have a physical burner phone for all this nonsense. Costs like $15 bucks and totally worth the tiny investment.

> To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.

I had to look up whether this was actually official communication, since it sounds like a kafkaesque fever dream, but yes it's real.

Tech CO's have been doing everything in their power to get your number and email, used it for advertising, and deliberately disabled non-regular phone numbers. And now suddenly you're being gaslit that it's your fault for complying with their demands.

The cream of the cake is the vague "if your phone number is publicly known" stuff. Well yeah, every single phone number is publicly known because it's enumerable. Even if it weren't, almost everyone's number is harvested and resold by gray-market data brokers. Sounds like they want to muddy the waters and make it sound like a targeted vulnerability when in reality it is indiscriminate.

Also, you can't really use Twitter with just an email. Sooner or later, anti-bot misidentifies you, locks you out, and asks you to "verify" by entering a phone number.

> we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.

> While no passwords were exposed, we encourage everyone who uses Twitter to enable 2-factor authentication

I think those things are incompatible, or at least Twitter really gives that impression. Great recommendation /s

How are those things incompatible?

The full sentence states:

While no passwords were exposed, we encourage everyone who uses Twitter to enable 2-factor authentication using authentication apps or hardware security keys to protect your account from unauthorized logins.

So it actually does not imply adding a phone number, which is seemingly what you have tried to imply with the cut-off quote provided.

Intentional drudgery? inconceivable!

> "it actually does not imply adding a phone number"

It actually does.

The sentence you quoted contains the link "enable 2-factor authentication", which goes to a page where adding a phone number is the FIRST method described.

"There are three methods to choose from: Text message, Authentication app, or Security key..... If you don’t already have a phone number associated with your account, we’ll prompt you to enter it."

Anyone else annoyed by the growing use of the word "impact" to speak increasingly passively?

People are so afraid to make a claim nowadays, even if it's obviously true. They speak of "impacts" or that something will be "impacted". But they seem to want to avoid saying who or what will be impacted.

"I was impacted by today's layoffs." "We expect there to be impacts to website traffic."

These meaningless words do nothing except to say "something has happened" which puts the reader in the mindset of having to unravel a mystery.

Anytime you write it's your job to make yourself understood. I don't want to have to be Encyclopedia Brown to figure out what you're trying to tell me.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=impacting&year...

Edit: A better headline for OP would have been "Private phone numbers + email addresses leaked for 5M Twitter accounts"

Exactly. They're giving the least information possible to formulate a coherent headline which is technically accurate. If they told the truth in the headline, it would get WAY more clicks. These are clicks they don't want.

Head wobble

Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" really should be required reading for all high school students. Personally, I re-read it every few years - chronic exposure to terrible English makes the bad habits grow back, so you need to pull the weeds regularly.

Another reminder not to use Twitter. It's not worth it. Mastodon is better.

Could not have picked a worse name for a social network.

Are you talking about Twitter or Mastodon? Many company and product names are awkward before they become mainstream.

Twitter is light hearted. Mastodon sounds like obscure metal band

who cares, this is the ultimate in bike shedding.

there's never a discussion on HN where someone brings up a product without this asinine comment about its name.

btw Mastodon is great software and it has a great name and branding. It's all subjective.

"we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account."

This is literally impossible. You can't create a Twitter account without a phone number. It sometimes allows you to do so, but then is blocked within 24 hours until you add one.

It's insulting that Twitter should lie about that.

> publicly known

Note the PR words they used. Which amounts to, "If you want privacy, it's not our problem. Go create a virtual number somewhere."

IME, numbers they have classified has VOIP or otherwise not a consumer or business cell service are disallowed. Skype numbers do not work, and I have had a spotty experience with Google Voice numbers as well.