Parts of the Twitter source code were recently online filtering via GitHubhe New York Times reports, but they were removed after the social media platform filed a DMCA request. The request, which GitHub has posted onlinenotes that the leaked information included “proprietary source code for the Twitter platform and internal tools.”
He NOW notes that the source code may have been public for several months before being removed: the GitHub profile associated with DMCA takedown lists a unique (non-public) code contribution from early January. The account name is listed as “FreeSpeechEnthusiast,” in an apparent reference to Twitter CEO Elon Musk calling himself “absolutist freedom of expression” in the past.
Twitter has asked for the names and IP addresses of anyone who downloaded the code.
Proprietary source code is often among a company’s most closely guarded trade secrets. Going public risks revealing vulnerabilities in your software to potential attackers, and may also give competitors an advantage by being able to see the non-public inner workings. Source code has been a common target for hackers in the past, including attacks on Microsoft and the cyberpunk 2077 Developer CD Projekt Red.
In addition to asking GitHub to remove the code, Twitter filed a court request in California in an attempt to find the person responsible and obtain information on any other GitHub users who may have downloaded the data. Bloomberg reports that the filing asked the court to order GitHub to disclose the names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, social media profiles, and IP addresses of users.
A GitHub spokesperson did not respond to questions about whether it would comply with Twitter’s request to provide identifying information, and an email sent to Twitter’s official press address received an automatically generated poop emoji in response. (Twitter’s press office was dissolved shortly after the Musk acquisition.)
According to the NOWTwitter executives suspect that an employee who left the company last year may be responsible for the leak. But that doesn’t exactly narrow things down given that Musk laid off thousands of company employees shortly after taking control of the social media network. Fears that leaving employees may try to sabotage the business by leaving have reportedly led Twitter to implement code freezes ahead of layoffs.
News of the leaked source code comes just days before Twitter is supposed to open up the source code.”all the code used to recommend tweets” on March 31. But open a recommendation algorithm like this (if you really go ahead this time), it will likely reveal much less company-proprietary code than the recent leak posted on GitHub.
Twitter has been through a turbulent time since Musk acquired it last year. The Tesla CEO, who paid $44 billion for Twitter last year but now says it’s only worth $20 billion, has been trying to reshape the social media network with an intense focus on cutting costs and creating new revenue opportunities like your Twitter Blue paid subscriptions. . But the core reliability of the service appears to have suffered as a result, with several reported outages and outages in recent months.
