1 July 2020
Social media platform, Twitter, has revealed details of a data breach.
Twitter became aware of the data breach on 20 May 2020 and an email has been sent to customers whom use the platform for advertising.
Twitter has advised customers who hold Twitter Ads and/or Analytics accounts, that their personal data may have been stored for longer than it should have on the web browsers cache. This means, the personal data used by Twitter customers to log into their personal accounts from shared computers may have been stored on the computer’s cache (memory). Therefore making it available to anyone using the same computer after the user had logged out of Twitter.
The personal data left on the web browsers cache included email addresses, phone numbers and the last four digits of any credit cards used to buy ads on Twitter.
The problem has now been fixed by updating the instructions Twitter sends to browser caches to prevent this happening again.
A Twitter spokesperson said
“We became aware of an incident where if you viewed your billing information on ads.twitter.com or analytics.twitter.com the billing information may have been stored in the browser’s cache,”. “As soon as we discovered this was happening, we resolved the issue and communicated to potentially impacted clients to make sure they were aware and informed on how to protect themselves moving forward.”
Twitter confirmed the incident to TechCrunch but declined to disclose the number of people affected.
If you are a customer of Twitter Ads or Twitter Analytics, get in touch with our experienced team to see if you have a claim.