Twitter experienced a leak for some of its source code, according to a filing sent through a copyright infringement notice to GitHub. The company is trying to identify the ones who are responsible for this leak and those people who downloaded the code.
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SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - OCTOBER 28: The Twitter logo is posted on the exterior of Twitter headquarters on October 28, 2022 in San Francisco, California Elon Musk closed the deal to purchase social media platform Twitter for $44 billion and has already fired several top executives.
Leaked Source Code
Some parts of Twitter's source code have been leaked online, which is one of the most important codes in order for the social networking site to function. Bloomberg reported that a copyright infringement notice was sent to GitHub, with a request to remove the leaked source code.
GitHub is an online collaboration platform for software developers where several codes are posted. As of now, the code has been removed but the company remains to be worried about how long the code had been leaked online. The report states that it appears to have been public for at least months now.
Due to the limited information, Twitter asked the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in a way to help the company, along with GitHub to identify the suspect behind this leakage. Fortunately, GitHub complied and resolved the issue that might harm the company more.
Global Village Space reported that this leak comes after Twitter Chief Elon Musk tweeted that he was one of the people who suggested making Twitter's code public for this month. He said that he would make the could public by the end of March.
The leaker appeared by the name "FreeSpeechEnthusiast", which was used to reference Musk who has referred to himself as a free speech absolutist.
Twitter's Struggles
The executives were informed late regarding the source code leak, as per the investigation. One major concern for this is that released code includes security vulnerabilities that could give attackers or hackers an idea of the means to extract user data or take down the whole site.
This problem also adds to the challenges currently changing by Musk with Twitter. Especially that companies in the tech industry often view this type of code as a closely held secret and do encourage to not tell it to competitors to avoid unfair advantage or reveal vulnerabilities.
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Despite them being very protective, New York Times reported that tech companies still become a common target for opportunists, hackers, and others. This leak also affected the company which led to structural and financial challenges. Musk has been struggling to cut costs but also try out new things like new features and previously banned users from this company.
Aside from this, Twitter lately experiences several outages. Meanwhile, the advertisers were the main source of revenue for the company. Emsisoft Threat Analyst described Anetra's public posting of Twitter's code. "It does make it a little bit easier and speedier to probe for vulnerabilities," he said.
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