An anonymous hacker has claimed to leak the entirety of Twitch which is publicly available in a 125 GB torrent link on 4chan which includes the site’s source code and creator payout figures.
The hacker’s intention in the massive site-wide leak is to “foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space.” They add the motivation of the hack is because “their community is a disgusting toxic cesspool”. According to VGC, the hack is legitimate says an anonymous company source. Twitch hasn’t said anything publicly but the course adds that internally that Twitch is aware of the breach and they believe it was obtained as early as Monday.
As to what was exactly leaked in that torrent link, the leaked Twitch data reportedly includes
- The entirety of Twitch’s source code with comment history “going back to its early beginnings”
- Creator payout reports from 2019
- Mobile, desktop and console Twitch clients
- Proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch
- “Every other property that Twitch owns” including IGDB and CurseForge
- An unreleased Steam competitor, codenamed Vapor, from Amazon Game Studios
- Unity code for Vapeworld, a chat software based on Vapor.
- Twitch internal ‘red teaming’ tools (designed to improve security by having staff pretend to be hackers)
With the data publicly available, some Twitter users have been looking through it and have also discovered it also includes encrypted passwords. To this, the hacker seemingly went through the data to ensure personal account data was not included in the leak. Don’t put too much faith in the hacker though, just to be safe please change your password and be double safe to enable two-factor authorization.
The final massive leak is the inclusion of payout information from the site’s most popular content creators, which is based on a document from August 2019 to October 2021. Let’s just say it doesn’t reveal anything new but just puts a figure to how much streamers make and yeah it’s a gross amount of money. Check it out for yourself.
The hacker has said this isn’t the whole leak as this week’s leak is apparently just the first part, but didn’t go into it when they’d release the rest. It really hasn’t been a great year for the streaming platform after it’s come under fire from creators and users who feel the site isn’t doing enough for minority streamers, hate raids and the site’s problematic members.
