While we were all reeling from The Facebook shutdown, Twitch was at the receiving end of a catastrophic hack.
Some are calling it “the biggest leak” they have ever seen and say that it will have significant ramifications for Twitch.
On the 4chan message board, an anonymous poster has posted a 125GB torrent claiming to contain the entirety of Twitch and its commit history.
Twitch has confirmed the leak saying “A breach has taken place”. In a statement Twitch said: “Our teams are working with urgency to understand the extent of this. We will update the community as soon as additional information is available. Thank you for bearing with us.”
The hack was so extensive that it resulted in the theft of Twitch’s source code as well as a large amount of data, including anything from how much Twitch’s top streamers earn (a lot) to the existence of a Steam-like game client codenamed Vapor that Twitch is working on.
Twitch closely guards how much it pays its streamers and has said of the hack “it comes at a time when competitors such as YouTube Gaming are offering huge salaries to snap up gaming talent, so the fallout could be significant.”
According to the leaked “earnings” list, 81 Twitch streamers have been paid more than $1 million by the company since August 2019.
Fortnite streamer BBG Calc told BBC News that the leak got his earnings “100% correct” and two other streamers said the figures were “about right”.
The leak reportedly included:
- 3 years’ worth of details regarding creator payouts on Twitch.
- The entirety of twitch. tv, “with commit history going back to its early beginnings.”
- Source code for the mobile, desktop, and video game console Twitch clients.
- Code related to proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch.
- An unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios.
- Data on other Twitch properties like IGDB and CurseForge.
- Twitch’s internal security tools.
The leaker said that the leak was “part one” suggesting more data is expected to be leaked in the future.
The breach comes a month after Twitch Streamers openly protested the “hate raids” that had been taking place and Twitch’s lack of response.
The leak doesn’t appear to include Users’ personal information and seems to be focused on hurting Twitch as a company and not the personal users themselves.
That may be true, but if you haven’t already, we recommend changing your Twitch password and using two-factor authentication on your account.