A data breach at social media platform X was allegedly found over the weekend. About 2.8 billion user accounts are reportedly affected, which makes this potentially one of the biggest social media leaks to date.
This breach was reported by the cybersecurity team at SafetyDetectives, who found a post on a hacking message board BreachForums. The post in question featured a 34GB *.CSV file containing roughly 201 million entries of data allegedly belonging to X users. The data reportedly includes the email addresses linked to the X accounts, as well as other information such as account creation dates, locations, display names, and tweet and favourite counts.
According to the post on BreachForums, the leak occurred on January 2025 and was likely an inside job by a “disgruntled employee”. The poster also claimed that they found no indication that X or the general public are aware of the data breach and that they had attempted to contact X but received no response.
In 2023, the personal data of around 209 million X users was leaked in a data breach. While this was a smaller leak, it did include the email addresses linked to the user accounts. The poster on BreachForums used this information to create a file on users affected by the 2025 leak whose email addresses were previously leaked in 2023.
While X did acknowledge the 2023 leak, it downplayed the severity of the leak by claiming the data was publicly available. However, the alleged 2025 leak has yet to be acknowledged. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, acquired the social media platform on Friday.
(Source: Mashable)
Nurul contributed to this article.
