Earlier in October, pretty much the entirety of Twitch was hacked and leaked onto the internet. Apparently, passwords weren’t included, though.
That’s what Twitch says, anyway. The streaming site issued an update on Friday in the aftermath of the big hack, saying that user passwords, credit cards, and banking info weren’t accessed by the hackers. Those are basically the only things that were left out, as everything from Twitch’s entire source code to payout reports for the top Twitch creators from 2019 to the present was laid bare for all to see.
Twitch did say a “small fraction” of users were impacted by the data that got out there, and the company will contact those people directly.
You’d be forgiven for looking at this and thinking to yourself “whew, I’m fine!” but that’d be a short-sighted view of things. Sure, your Twitch info may not have gotten compromised this time, but that doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. Allow us to issue a friendly reminder to 1) change your password anyway and 2) enable two-factor authentication on any website where you store any personal information of any kind. Twitch has a handy support page explaining exactly how to do it.
If you aren’t familiar with 2FA, it’s the easiest way to protect yourself from hacks like this. As its name suggests, it requires two steps to log into an account instead of just entering a username and password. Usually, this comes in the form of texting a one-time use login code to your mobile phone or using an authentication app. It only adds a few seconds to the login process and can act as a brick wall for nefarious hackers.
Again, you most likely weren’t affected by what happened to Twitch a couple weeks ago. But if you take this simple step now, you can protect yourself from being affected the next time.
