Twitter confirmed that a security incident publicly exposed Circle tweets

A security problem caused the public sharing of private tweets sent to Twitter Circles to users outside of the Circle, the company admitted.

Since August 2022, the Twitter Circle feature allows users to send tweets to a restricted circle of users, these messages are not visible to Twitter users outside the Circle.

As reported by BleepingComputer, around April 7, some Twitter users noticed the issue. The Guardian reported that for weeks users had been reporting Circles tweets receiving likes and views from users outside the circle.

The social network giant confirmed the problem, it started notifying the impacted users.

“We’re contacting you because your Twitter account may have been potentially impacted by a security incident that occurred earlier this year (April 2023)”, reads a security incident notification sent by Twitter to the impacted users. “In April 2023, a security incident may have allowed users outside of your Twitter Circle to see tweets that should have otherwise been limited to the Circle to which you were posting. This issue was identified by our security team and immediately fixed so that these tweets were no longer visible outside of your Circle.”

“We’ve conducted a thorough investigation to understand how this occurred and have addressed this issue. Twitter is committed to protecting the privacy of the people who use our service, and we understand the risks that an incident like this can introduce and we deeply regret this happened.”

The company did not provide details about the security incident.

Since Elon Musk took ownership of the company, a large portion of its staff left the company and at the same time, the platform introduced multiple changes to its code.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, privacy)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.