03-15-2025, 04:34 PM
So, I'm doing some deep research into the January, 2025 leak of 2.8B Twitter accounts.
I'm trying to figure out how someone could get a list of all Twitter accounts (assuming they do not have access to internal Twitter databases).
Brute force doesn't explain it. Checking all possible account names ("a", "aa", etc. like password cracking), there would be way too many lookups (e.g. even at just 10 characters, that would be 5 quadrillion lookups). Checking all possible userids would be even worse (at 300 billion possible userids per day).
Is anyone familiar with the Twitter API, and whether this would in theory be possible?
I'm trying to figure out how someone could get a list of all Twitter accounts (assuming they do not have access to internal Twitter databases).
Brute force doesn't explain it. Checking all possible account names ("a", "aa", etc. like password cracking), there would be way too many lookups (e.g. even at just 10 characters, that would be 5 quadrillion lookups). Checking all possible userids would be even worse (at 300 billion possible userids per day).
Is anyone familiar with the Twitter API, and whether this would in theory be possible?