Hacker lists demands as Twitter faces fresh threat with leaked data of 400 million users

The threat actor known as Ryushi was spotted on the Breached hacking forum, a popular site where hackers patronize to sell user data stolen in data breaches. The hacker went ahead to publish sample data for 37 celebrities, politicians, journalists, corporations, and government agencies.

The affected user profiles of the public and private Twitter data include users' email addresses, names, usernames, follower count, creation date, and phone numbers.

Recall, reperotes of this data breach at Twitter was earlier revealed by a Los Angeles-based cyber security expert and founder of Habitu8, Chad Loder who warned that over 5 million user data was leaked by hackers.

The reported data breach gained prominence at the end of July when the hacker later went ahead to put a $30,000 price tag for the leaked data (exact figure of affected accounts - 5,485,636).

In the fresh hack, the hacker has sent out a message to Elon Musk and Twitter with an offer to either purchase the data or risk a large fine under Europe's GDPR privacy law.

"Twitter or Elon Musk if you are reading this you are already risking a GDPR fine over 5.4m breach imaging the fine of 400m users breach source," wrote Ryushi in a forum post.

"Your best option to avoid paying $276 million USD in GDPR breach fines like Facebook did (due to 533m users being scraped) is to buy this data exclusively."

According to Bleeping Computer, the threat actor Ryushi confirmed they hope to sell the Twitter data exclusively to a single person/Twitter for $200,000 after which they will delete the data.

They however warned that If Twitter fails to make the exclusive purchase, they will proceed to sell off copies of the hacked data to multiple people for $60,000 per sale.