Like most social media sites, Twitter is no stranger to security breaches. Over the years, Twitter has fallen victim to numerous malicious attacks, some worse than others. So, when was Twitter's first security breach, and what does the timeline look like up to today?

1. The 2009 Twitter Breaches

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Twitter's first noteworthy breach occurred back in 2009. This breach involved the hacking of 33 different accounts, including that of Barack Obama, who was the US president at the time. Twitter's own internal support tools were exploited by the attacker to crack passwords and carry out this hack, which came at the same time as phishing campaign that was also targeting Twitter users.

A Twitter blog post stated that the accounts were locked immediately when staff became aware of the issue, and it didn't take long for the affected users to regain full control.

But this isn't the last breach that Twitter suffered in 2009. In April 2009, Twitter ran into another security incident when an employee's personal email account was compromised by a hacker. While in the account, the hacker found two passwords and changed at least one Twitter account password.

2. The 2013 Twitter Breaches

Twitter's 2013 security incidents began in February. This breach was undeniably huge, with around 250,000 users being affected.

Twitter didn't go into great detail about the nature of this attack and the vector, or vectors, used. But a Twitter blog post regarding the incident stated that "attackers may have had access to limited user information—usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords—for approximately 250,000 users."

In April 2013, the Associated Press stated that its Twitter account had been hacked, with the attacker uploading a post about a fake bomb incident occurring at the White House. This hack only affected one account, and the account itself was locked soon after the incident; this phony tweet still caused a lot of commotion and unnecessary concern.

3. The 2018 Twitter Breaches

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In 2018, two key Twitter security breaches took place. The first, which occurred in May, involved a bug within Twitter's own code, which left 330 million user passwords exposed. In other words, everyone who had a Twitter account at the time was affected by this vulnerability. The bug led to plaintext (unencrypted) versions of user passwords exposed in Twitter's internal system.

In a Twitter blog post, users were informed that "passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process". However, users were also reassured in the same post that no abuse of the bug had been detected.

Later that year, in December, another Twitter software flaw was announced by the company, which had led to a security breach the month prior. This breach led to the leak of users' phone numbers and country codes. On top of this, the flaw revealed whether a given account had been locked. Thankfully, Twitter quickly resolved the issue just a day after investigations began.

4. The 2019 Twitter Breaches

The latter half of 2019 brought a wave of security and privacy issues for Twitter, starting in October. But this first incident was actually the fault of Twitter itself. In fact, Twitter admitted that it had breached its users' privacy by using personal data

In a Twitter statement, it was claimed that this data had "inadvertently been used for advertising purposes", indicating that the company did not knowingly use it. Email addresses and phone numbers were used by Twitter in its Tailored Audiences and Partner Audiences advertising systems, allegedly for security purposes. But regardless of this, people began to question the integrity of the social media platform.

In November 2019, Twitter ran into two security issues, the first concerned with its own former employees. In this case, two former Twitter staff were charged with spying on users for Saudi Arabia.

The Guardian said that the two employees obtained personal account information from thousands of users without authorization for Saudi officials. The two perpetrators, one a US citizen and one a Saudi citizen, even breached some high profile accounts, such as that of well-known journalist Omar Abdulaziz. In return for the provided information, the two men were allegedly gifted a designer watch and tens of thousands of dollars.

Later in November, an app store software bug led to hundreds of Twitter users having their data leaked. The affected users had used their Twitter account to log into various Google Play Store apps, which led to the breach. At the core of the problem was a development kit named One Audience. One Audience gave unauthorized access to Twitter users' personal information, constituting a breach. Twitter wasted no time in notifying the relevant app stores of the bug.

5. The 2020 Twitter Breach

2020 was a tough year for everyone, with the COVID-19 pandemic causing global shock waves. But 2020 also brought a Twitter breach that didn't just target regular accounts, but high-profile, widely known accounts owned by Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Kanye West, and over a hundred other public figures.

On July 15, Twitter confirmed that a security incident was taking place, though the company didn't go into great detail at the time.

These high-profile accounts were used to push crypto scams. For example, Joe Biden's account was compromised, with the hacker stating that Biden was doubling any Bitcoin funds sent to the wallet address provided and returning it to the original senders. Of course, no crypto would be doubled, or returned at all. The same Bitcoin wallet was posted on each compromised account, which eventually accrued 11 Bitcoin, worth over $100,000 at the time.

6. The 2021/ 2022 Twitter Breach

2022 wasn't a great year for the social media giant, with controversy surrounding new Twitter ownership, the monetization of the verification badge, and a good few security incidents.

The first Twitter security breach of 2022 came in July, when an individual on a hacking forum claimed that they had accessed the data of over five million Twitter users. The stolen data included email addresses and phone numbers.

The individual stole this data by exploiting a software bug within Twitter's systems. Though Twitter fixed the issue and had found no evidence of exploitation, this did not turn out to be the case.

Twitter worked to verify whether this hacking forum user was being truthful in their claim. In a Twitter Privacy post, the company stated that "after reviewing a sample of the available data for sale, [it] confirmed that a bad actor had taken advantage of the issue before it was addressed."

This led to another huge issue for Twitter. In November of the same year, the hacker who claimed to have over five million users' data in July finally published the stolen information. It turned out that the hacker had exploited the bug in 2021, many months before Twitter was notified of its existence.

7. The First 2023 Twitter Breach

At the time of writing, 2023 isn't over, so there may be subsequent breaches this year. But a major security issue managed to crop up for Twitter at the turn of the new year.

In January, various news outlets reported that a shocking 235 million Twitter accounts had their email addresses shared on a hacking forum. Though the data stolen wasn't highly sensitive, it may still pose a risk to users if the email addresses leaked are exploited by other malicious actors.

Twitter's Past Is Rife With Security Breaches

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has had to deal with numerous security and privacy incidents, be it from hackers, ex-staff, or the company itself. Users should always try and employ all the security measures available to them to avoid being targeted, but sometimes there is simply no stopping these illicit individuals from accessing the data or money that they desire.