‘Largest social media breach ever:’ Knowledge of 200 mn X customers leaked in 34 GB file: Report – Firstpost

In what comes as doubtlessly the most important social media breach ever, information of some 200 million X customers might have been compromised and made accessible on a hacking discussion board. The alleged breach was first reported by Safetydetective.com, whose researchers discovered a 34 GB downloadable file on hacking discussion board “BreachForums” posted by a consumer ‘ThinkingOne’.

The 34 GB file allegedly had information of about 201 million X customers. In keeping with Safetydetective.com, ThinkingOne claims to have shared the information after the realisation that neither X nor public and X customers had been conscious of the ‘information breach’. ThinkingOne additionally claims to have “tried contacting X by way of a number of strategies with no response.”

‘Knowledge of X customers real’

In the meantime, researchers at Safetydetective.com claimed the information accessible within the file was real, which they verified by matching the data with their authentic X IDs.

“We reviewed the data equivalent to 100 customers within the listing, and we discovered that it matched what was proven on Twitter. We additionally verified a substantial quantity of emails, which turned out to be legitimate electronic mail addresses, although we can’t verify that the emails belong to the accounts listed,” the researchers mentioned.

They additional mentioned that the alleged compromised information contained info corresponding to X display names and consumer IDs, full names, places, electronic mail addresses, follower counts, profile information, time zones, profile pictures, and extra.

ThinkingOne, in a dialog with Forbes, mentioned they weren’t hackers however ‘information lovers” who don’t bask in unlawful acts and “guarantee all the pieces they do is authorized”.

As per ThinkingOne, “That is by far the most important social media breach ever, when it comes to a lot of customers, and there’s no less than a chance that the particular person liable for the breach has different information, together with emails, telephone numbers and passwords.”

Origin of knowledge breach nonetheless unclear

The precise origin of the information breach continues to be unclear. Nevertheless, ThinkingOne claims they accessed X information leaked in January 2022 and mixed it with one other breach leaked in January 2025.

“The dataset leaked in January 2025 included over 2.8 billion distinctive Twitter IDs and screennames,” ThinkingOne was quoted as saying by Forbes, “I checked a consultant pattern of 100 and 92 had the proper consumer ID and screenname.’

The hacker added: “How may somebody enumerate all Twitter consumer IDs, until they had been an worker or this was a really severe hacking job?”