There has been a breach of Twitter data, affecting over 200 million users. The data is believed to have been stolen by hackers who are giving it away for free on a hacker forum.
Compromised information included email addresses used to set up accounts on the micro-blogging platform.
Alon Gal of cyber-crime information firm Hudson Rock, which spotted the leak, told BBC it contained more than 200 million email addresses and was “significant”.
He added that it could lead to many accounts getting hacked, targeted with phishing, or doxxed.
Doxxing is the act of publishing personal information about someone that can lead to their identification.
Other news platforms, such as, Tech news website Bleeping Computer, have also probed the issue while some have downloaded the data to confirm.
Bleeping Computer confirmed that the email addresses were correct for many of the listed Twitter profiles. The tech news outlet also found the data contained duplicates.
“The full dataset has obviously not been confirmed. The dataset is far from complete, as there were many users who were not found in the leak”, the outlet added.
