Twitter bug allowed to match 17 million phone numbers with users

In yet another data breach on Twitter which has gone through a bad year on security, a researcher has claimed he matched 17 million phone numbers to user accounts – including high-profile politicians and officials — by exploiting a vulnerability in Twitter’s Android app.

Security researcher Ibrahim Balic found that it was possible to upload entire lists of generated phone numbers through Twitter’s contacts upload feature, reports TechCrunch.

“If you upload your phone number, it fetches user data in return,” he was quoted as saying.

Most of the users were in countries like Israel, Turkey, Iran, Greece, Armenia, France and Germany.