Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch suffered a massive data breach on Wednesday, leaking the source code of the company's streaming service along with two years of details of the creators' payments.
The leak, which initially appeared on the 4chan message board, was linked to a torrent that weighed 125 gigabytes in data. The poster, which is anonymous, claims that the leak includes the entirety of Twitch and its code history. The poster claims that the leak is intended to "encourage more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space."
Rebel News can confirm the legitimacy of the leak, which includes payment data from creators as recent as September 2021 and dates back to mid-2019. The leak also contains code for Twitch web, mobile, desktop and game console clients as recent like last week.
Twitch confirmed it suffered a data breach early Wednesday, hours after details of the leak surfaced on social media, with many pointing to the gains from the platform's most popular streamers.
As corroborated the EdgeThe leak includes three years of details of creator payments on Twitch; the entire Twitch.tv website "with the history of comets dating back to their beginnings"; source code for Twitch clients on mobile, desktop and game console platforms; a previously unreleased competitor to Valve's Steam, an online video game digital distribution service; code related to new proprietary Amazon services; data about other Twitch properties, including Curseforge and IGDB; and finally Twitch's internal security tools.
The 4chan leaker claims that the Twitch leak is simply a piece of more data to come.
the Edge reported:
The leak has been labeled "part one", suggesting there could be more to come. While personal information such as creator payments is included, this initial leak does not appear to include passwords, addresses, or email accounts of Twitch users. Instead, the leaker appears to have focused on sharing Twitch's own company tools and information, rather than code that would include personal accounts.
โฆ The Twitch leak will be detrimental to the game streaming service in any way and particularly to creators who rely on Twitch to keep their earnings and information safe. The hack follows weeks of protests for Twitch to improve its service under the #DoBetterTwitch movement. Twitch streamers also took a day off in August to protest the company's inaction against hate forays.
Despite containing payment details for the creators of Twitch, the leak does not include any password or address information of the users and creators of the platform. However, this does not mean that private data was not also obtained in the apparent breach.
The platform has asked users to change their passwords and take security precautions in light of the leak.
Unlike the recent leak of Facebook user profile data, which included the details of some 1.5 billion users, the Twitch breach appears to be ideologically motivated, as the responsible leaker put the stolen data for free and did not attempt to sell it.
We can confirm that a violation has occurred. Our teams are working urgently to understand the scope of this. We will update the community as soon as additional information is available. Thanks for supporting us.
- Twitch (@Twitch) October 6, 2021
