Perpetrators Of Twitter's Source Code Leak Are Being Hunted

Up until last week, portions of Twitter's copyrighted source code were available online, the company said in a Friday court filing in California.

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The code was published to GitHub, a popular code repository that is now owned by Microsoft Corp. This code serves as the foundation for the web service's numerous operations and internal tools. Twitter asked GitHub to delete the material in response to a copyright infringement accusation, and GitHub agreed. Twitter also disclosed its request publicly. FreeSpeechEnthusiast, the GitHub account in charge of the uploading, registered at the beginning of the year and seems to have merely uploaded the Twitter cache.

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The person who is behind that account, as well as the identities and other details of every user who posted, downloaded, or uploaded the material, are all now being sought by Twitter. The Elon Musk-founded social network is requesting information from GitHub on those individuals' names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, social media accounts, and IP addresses. A New York Times article citing unidentified persons familiar with the situation claims that the corporation has also started an internal probe into the leak.

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GitHub cited its posting of Twitter's takedown request as evidence and declined to comment on its choice to delete the content. When asked explicitly about the data leak through email, Twitter didn't react.

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Twitter may become more susceptible to hacking efforts if its inner workings are exposed.

The event is not the first time a tech company's source code has been made public. LastPass, a password management service, said last year that technical data and source code had been taken by hackers. Uber Technologies Inc.'s mobile management systems' source code was reportedly compromised in a breach that resulted in the release in December.

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A number of leaks, including the source code for Microsoft Corp.'s Cortana virtual assistant and the Bing search engine, have been attributed to the hacker organization Lapsus$. The popular software from Texas-based SolarWinds Inc. was infiltrated by suspected Russian hackers in a breach that was made public in December 2020. Malicious malware was inserted into SolarWinds software updates as part of the assault, which also affected Microsoft source code.

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The FreeSpeechEnthusiast pseudonym selected by the Twitter leaker seems to be a jab at Musk, who said he would introduce free speech to the platform when he assumed control of the business late last year.

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