Data meltdown on Twitter: important software code available on the web

Parts of Twitter’s software code have been made public on the Internet as a result of an unusually serious data breach. The American company is now demanding information about the person or persons allegedly responsible for the publication.

Twitter also requested data from the programming platform Github about any users there who may have seen or downloaded the computer code, according to court filings over the weekend.

Potentially unknown vulnerabilities

Twitter also launched an internal investigation, the New York Times reported Monday evening, citing unnamed sources.

A concern is that the code may contain undiscovered vulnerabilities that attackers can find and exploit to gain access to data or sabotage the platform.

The public release of the Twitter code is “concerning,” said Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Emsisoft, a cybersecurity software company. “It makes it a bit easier and faster to find vulnerabilities.”

Twitter executives only recently found out about the leak, according to the New York Times. That would mean the software code could have been online on Github for well over two months. Because the account that published the data, according to Twitter, had uploaded something there only once, according to data from the platform — on January 3.

Was it a fired employee?

The extent of the leak was initially unclear. Such basic program codes belong to the well-kept secrets of an online platform. Twitter claimed copyrights to remove the data from the internet.

At the same time, Twitter owner Elon Musk wants to make public the algorithm at the end of March, which selects tweets for individual users if they are sorted by the software and not displayed in chronological order.

Twitter suspects someone who worked at Twitter until last year is behind the leak, the New York Times wrote. Musk laid off half of its roughly 7,000 employees after acquiring Twitter for about $44 billion in October.

Sources

(dsc/sda/dpa)