Twitter Inc has discovered suspicious traffic to a customer-support forum while investigating a security bug that exposed data, including users' phone country codes and details on locked accounts. It said the bug was fixed on November 16. But in return its shares fell almost 7 percent after this incident. A security firm said hackers used the platform to try to steal user data.
IP addresses from the two countries had sent a large number of inquiries using the form. These could have had ties to "state-sponsored actors", Twitter said. Stressing that they could not confirm "intent or attribution for certain", Twitter's statement said they had informed the authorities about their discovery in the interest of "full transparency".
Those directly affected have been informed, Twitter said. No full phone numbers were revealed, nor any other personal data.
Twitter observed a large amount of traffic to the customer support site coming from individual internet IP addresses in China and Saudi Arabia.
"We continue to err on the side of full transparency in this area and have updated law enforcement on our findings," it said.
A company spokesman declined to elaborate as Twitter shares posted their biggest drop in more than two months.
“We have directly informed the people we identified as being affected. We are providing this broader notice as it is possible that other account holders we cannot identify were potentially impacted,” Twitter said, adding it is “sorry this happened”.
A Twitter spokesperson told in a report, “For our part, we are committed to understanding how bad-faith actors use our services. We will continue to proactively combat nefarious attempts to undermine the integrity of Twitter.”
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