MyRecon OSINT
Twitter (200M)
On 1 January 2021, Twitter (200M) was breached. 211,524,284 accounts were exposed, including email addresses, names, social media profiles. MyRecon rates it 62/100 — severe. That is roughly everyone in Russia.
This one is dangerous for a reason the account count does not convey. The API that was abused resolved an email address to a profile. The resulting file therefore does something no ordinary credential dump does: it links a pseudonymous handle to a real email address.
For most people that is an annoyance. For anyone whose account was deliberately separated from their identity — someone posting under a pseudonym about a government, an employer, an abusive partner, a religion they left, or a diagnosis — it is the specific harm they built the separation to prevent. The link is not reversible, the file is public, and a password change does nothing about it.
If that applies to you, the useful response is not account hygiene. It is to check which email address the pseudonymous account was registered with, assume the connection is known, and decide whether the account should continue under that identity at all.
What happened
In early 2023, over 200M records scraped from Twitter appeared on a popular hacking forum. The data was obtained sometime in 2021 by abusing an API that enabled email addresses to be resolved to Twitter profiles. The subsequent results were then composed into a corpus of data containing email addresses alongside public Twitter profile information including names, usernames and follower counts.
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Who was behind it
No party has been publicly confirmed as responsible, and this page will not name one. Most breaches are never formally attributed: data surfaces on a forum or inside a combined dump long after the intrusion, and the trail back to a specific actor is rarely made public. Where a group has claimed responsibility it is usually named in the account above — that claim is theirs, not a finding of ours.
What was exposed, and why it matters
- Email addressesThe address becomes a confirmed, active target — expect more phishing, better aimed.
- NamesTurns an anonymous address into an identified person, which is what makes targeted phishing possible.
- Social media profilesAdds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
- UsernamesA handle links this account to every other place the same handle is used.
What to do if you were in it
- Expect better-aimed phishing. A message that already knows your name and where you have an account is the whole point of a breach like this.
Questions people ask about this breach
Was my email address in the Twitter (200M) breach?
Enter it in the box at the top of this page. MyRecon checks it against this breach and every other one on record, and the address is never stored.
What data was leaked in the Twitter (200M) breach?
email addresses, names, social media profiles, usernames. Each one is explained above, along with what it means for the person it belongs to.
When did it happen, and when did it become public?
The breach is dated 1 January 2021. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 5 January 2023, a gap of 735 days during which the data was already out.
Is the Twitter (200M) breach real?
Yes. Have I Been Pwned lists it as verified, meaning the data was checked against the source rather than taken on trust.
How many people were affected?
211,524,284 accounts. That is roughly everyone in Russia. That is accounts rather than people — one person often has several.
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Three kinds of content appear on this page and they are kept apart deliberately. The breach description is quoted from Have I Been Pwned under its licence. The severity score, the field-by-field explanation and the advice are computed from the record itself — every sentence derives from a number or a flag in it, which is what stops the analysis drifting from the evidence. Anything under the "MyRecon's take" byline is editorial: our reading of this breach, presented as opinion rather than as a finding.