An announcement from Twitter has stated that parts of the platform’s source code ended up being leaked online, making it possibly vulnerable to hacking operations, and officials from the company have expressed suspicion that the blame could fall on a very disgruntled insider.
This past Friday, the social media company told GitHub, an online hosting service for software development, that it had allowed the source code for Twitter to be posted in full violation of copyright law, explained a report from The New York Times. Twitter has officially filed a motion within the S. District Court for the Northern District of California calling on the course to order GitHub to release the identity of the person responsible for the leak and anyone else involved in the caper, the Times stated.
GitHub fired back to the filing from Twitter by requesting a detailed description of the copyrighted code that had allegedly been infringed, which prompted Twitter to state that said the material was “proprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools.” The platform acknowledged that it had absolutely no systems set up to control access to the uploaded content.
This source code is the software that is integral to the operation of Twitter’s programming functions. Brett Callow, a threat analyst, explained to the Times that by publicly posting the source code of the platform, the job for hackers was made much easier by making “it a little bit easier and speedier to probe for vulnerabilities.”
GitHub ended up taking the post down this past Friday, but it had reportedly been sitting on the platform for a few months. It is not yet known when Twitter actually became aware of the code being stolen and released onto the sharing platform before bringing it to the attention of GitHub. As part of the Friday filing, Twitter pressed GitHug to save any and al data that could end up being relevant to find out who was responsible for the act, such as contact info, IP addresses, or other information.
As reported by the Times, the person who has leaked the source code for Twitter apparently labels themself as “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” on GitHub.
Twitter owner Elon Musk has explained that he intends to make a number of critical parts of the company’s code “open source,” or accessible to the public by as soon as the end of this month.
“Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st. … We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress,” stated Musk via a tweet back on the 17th of March. “That’ll also be open source. Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust.”
Our “algorithm” is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things , but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found!
We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. That’ll also…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2023
