Portions of Twitter’s source code leaked online: report

News

by David Propper

March 26, 2023 | 10:49 p.m

Parts of the critical computer code that keeps Twitter up and running online have been leaked, the Elon Musk-led company said in a legal filing Friday.

The public exposure of the code came after the social media company took legal action to pull leaked information from GitHub, an online platform for software development, According to The New York Times.

GitHub agreed to remove the content immediately after Twitter sent the copyright infringement notice, though it’s unclear how long the code had been online.

The Times reported that it appeared she had been in public for several months.

One concern related to the leak is that the code includes security vulnerabilities that would give hackers an opportunity to steal user data or take down the site, two people familiar with an internal Twitter investigation told the Times.

Twitter also asked a federal court to force GitHub to disclose who shared the code and identify any other people who downloaded it, according to the filing.

The internal investigation into the leak determined that whoever published the code had left the company last year, as the executives handling the investigation were only recently briefed on the leak, two people familiar with the investigation told The Times.

The leaker appears to be named “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” on GitHub, according to a legal filing on Twitter.

The profile, whose pseudonym could be a reference to Musk who calls himself a free-speaker, shows the person contributed one item to the site in early January.

Musk, who bought the company for $44 billion in October, has faced mountains of turmoil since becoming CEO of the social media giant.

About 75% of the workforce that was employed before he took over have either been laid off or let go.

As the company faces stark changes, Musk told workers in an email Friday that Twitter is now worth about $20 billion as he cited mass layoffs and cost-cutting efforts that saved the company from bankruptcy, according to an email seen by the Times.

“Twitter is rapidly being reshaped,” he said in the email, adding that he believes the company could be worth $250 billion one day.