Twitch, a streaming service where a lot of streamers make money by playing video games and interacting with those who come to watch, has been hacked. The news was first reported by Video Games Chronicle. It is highly recommended that those who have a Twitch account change their passwords and enable 2FA. It has also been recommended that streamers reset their stream key.
According to Video Games Chronicle, an anonymous hacker claims to have leaked the entirety of Twitch, including its source code and user payout information. One anonymous source at Twitch told Video Games Chronicle that the leaked data is legitimate, including the source code for the Amazon-zoned streaming platform.
Here’s what 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 unrelated Steam competitor, codenamed Vapor, from Amazon Game Studios
- Twitch internal ‘red teaming’ tools (designed to improve security by having staff pretend to be hackers)
The Verge reported that the leak was legitimate and that it includes code that is as recent as this week. According to The Verge, this leak is labeled “part one”, indicating that there could be more to come.
The Verge also reported that an anonymous poster on the 4chan messaging board has released a 125GB torrent, which they claim includes the entirety of Twitch and its commit history. According to The Verge, the poster claimed that the leak is designed to “foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space.”
Twitch confirmed the breach on its Twitter account. @Twitch tweeted: “We can confirm a breach has taken place. 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.”
Twitch has been through a series of unfortunate events, most of which it failed to gain control of. Many streamers (especially people who are Black, LGBTQ+ or disabled) were hit by waves of “hate raids”. There are what seems to be an unending series of bots that come into streams and fill the chat with absolutely vile words. Many streamers collectively took a day off of Twitch in protest.