Massive Twitch Data Breach
Amazon owned game-streaming platform Twitch, with 30m daily visitors, has been the victim of a hack that has leaked confidential company information and streamers' earnings. Critically, this attack is understood to have leaked source code for the company’s streaming service.
An anonymous poster on the notorious 4chan image messaging board has released a 125GB torrent, which they claim includes the entirety of Twitch and its commit history. The 4chan post says the breach was intended to "foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space. The post called the Twitch community a "disgusting, toxic cesspool."
More than 100GB of data was posted online and the documents appear to show Twitch's top streamers each made millions of dollars from the Amazon-owned company in the past two years. Twitch said it was "working with urgency" to understand the extent of it. The the list of user payments is not thought to include third party details about sponsorship deals and other off-platform activities - or accounting information for tax paid on income.
Twitch tweeted to confirm the data breach. “We can confirm a breach has taken place,” it 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.” In another Twitch statement, the company said “Our investigation is ongoing and we are in the process of analysing all of the relevant logs and data to assess actual impact”, and it said it would "update the community as soon as additional information is available".
In recent months, Twitch has been battling a number of issues on its platform, such as "hate raids".
And in early September, a boycott titled "a day off Twitch" saw creators effectively strike in protest at the lack of action on hate raids.
The UK's Information Commissioner's Office said it had not been notified of any data breach by Twitch or Amazon.
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