An anonymous hacker has claimed to leak the entirety of the popular streaming platform Twitch.
While the network is used for streaming, it also provides a way for popular streamers to make money. Twitch gives money to streamers and they also receive money from users’ accounts. This means the site collects information such as credit card numbers, bank account information, PayPal accounts and more.
Here is a list of just some of the leaked information from the hack:
- How much the Top 81 Twitch streamers have made since August 2019. The information reveals some streamers have made more than a million dollars.
- The entirety of Twitch’s source code with commit history.
- Proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch.
- Details on other properties Twitch owns including IGDB and CurseForge.
- A unreleased steam competitor, codenamed Vapor, from Amazon Game Studios.
- Twitch internal ‘red teaming’ tools. These tools are made by the company to improve security and involve staff-run attempts to hack into the site.
The anonymous hacker said that this is just the first part of the content due to be leaked. The hacker did not include details about the dates of future information dumps or details about what else might have been accessed.
The hack and subsequent leak is a big deal for the streaming community and for web users everywhere. The scope of the attack is larger than many past cyber attacks. The BBC’s first ever dedicated cyber reporter called the hack one of the biggest leaks he had ever seen.
This is just more bad news for Twitch, which found itself facing blowback from users just last month. That’s when many users, upset by problematic members of the Twitch community, organized a 24-hour long boycott of the site.
In a statement posted to it’s Twitter account, the company said “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.”
In a blog update, Twitch added that there was “no indication” login credentials were exposed by the hack. In addition, the company said they do not independently store full credit card information, so no complete credit card information was stolen.
