Portions of Twitter’s software code have been exposed on the internet as a result of an unusually serious data breach. The short message service is now demanding information about who or those allegedly responsible behind the publication, as evidenced by court documents from the weekend. Twitter also requested data from the programming platform Github on all users who might have seen or downloaded the computer code there.
Twitter also launched an internal investigation, as the New York Times reported on Monday night, citing unnamed sources. One concern is that the program code may contain undiscovered vulnerabilities that attackers could find and exploit to access data or sabotage the platform.
Code online at Github for a good two months
Twitter managers only recently found out about the leak, the New York Times said. That would mean that the software code could have been online at Github for a good two months. Because the account that published the data according to Twitter had only uploaded something there once, according to data from the platform – on January 3rd.
The extent of the leak initially remained unclear. Such basic program codes are among the well-kept secrets of an online platform. Twitter asserted copyrights to get the data removed from the web. At the same time, Twitter owner Elon Musk wants to make the algorithm public at the end of March, which selects tweets for individual users if they are sorted by the software and not displayed in chronological order.
Who is behind the leak?
Twitter is suspected of being behind the leak by someone who worked on Twitter until last year, wrote the New York Times. Musk laid off half of the approximately 7,000 employees after the roughly $44 billion takeover of Twitter in October.
