Today marks another black spot on the social media platform community as anonymous hackers executed a massive hack of Twitch streamers’ online information.
Attempting to “foster disruption and competition in the online video streaming space,” the anonymous hacker has posted a 125GB torrent link to 4chan and VGC sources confirmed the files are in fact legit and still publicly available.
When question about the leak, Twitch has confirmed the leak which now 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 unreleased Steam competitor, codenamed Vapor, from Amazon Game Studios
- Twitch internal ‘red teaming’ tools (designed to improve security by having staff pretend to be hackers)
- Encrypted Passwords
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 (@Twitch) October 6, 2021
Aside from exposing the information of users, the leak also exposes the financials of 81 top streamers on the platform such as DrLupo, Shroud, and Nickmercs which were suspected of earning millions via the Twitch platform.
In addition to personal user data, the hack also includes information about the platform’s tools such as Unity code for a game dubbed Vapeworld which was planned as an Amazon exclusive to its unreleased Steam gaming store competitor Vapor.
As part of Amazon’s roster of gaming tools, Vapor would have had access to specialized Twitch features to leverage itself against Steam, if it ever becomes ready.
While Twitch scrambles to handle the fallout of the hack and sure up its security, the release of the hacked information today marks part one of a multi-part leak according to the hacker.
Today’s hack comes amid an already turbulent time for the streaming platform as users have already boycotted the service in protest of hate raid experiences.
