How bad will you be if hit with a leak?

It’s yet to be confirmed – but, then, who waits for confirmation these days – but the news is that hackers have stolen the email addresses of more than 200 million Twitter users and posted them on an online hacking forum. The allegation, to be fair, has been made by Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cybersecurity company Hudson Rock. That’s like a detergent manufacturer claiming that many hands are going to be dirty very soon because of a sewage leak that it has spotted. True or not, one thing is noticeable – the hack involves Twitter, arguably the entity that has been most ominously in world news at par with, perhaps, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But how bad will Twitter users feel, honestly, if their email addresses are actually found to be leaked in some giant cesspool for bad people to take? Well, more hacking, targeted phishing and doxxing – searching, finding and then making public private information on the internet. In today’s attention-craving that may not be a bad thing for many an attention-seeker wishing for that Warholian 15 minutes of fame, infamy or whatever the social media beast out there thinks best. That would, however, not be what the likes of Hudson Rock and other protectors are hoping for. After all, like any antivirus software company, they want you to be afraid of a sure and imminent pandemic outbreak.