Twitter suspends accounts used to match phone numbers with users

Twitter has revealed that it has suspended a large network of fake accounts that exploited a bug to match usernames to phone numbers.
“While we identified accounts located in a wide range of countries engaging in these behaviours, we observed a particularly high volume of requests coming from individual IP addresses located within Iran, Israel, and Malaysia,” Twitter said in a blog post on Monday.
“It is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors. We are disclosing this out of an abundance of caution and as a matter of principle,” the social media platform said.
In December last year, security researcher Ibrahim Balic found that it was possible to upload entire lists of generated phone numbers through Twitter’s contacts upload feature, TechCrunch reported.