Twitter went public in a very unexpected way recently after company officials discovered a significant leak of the social media platform’s source code.
A new report from The New York Times(Opens in a new tab) found that an unspecified part of that source code (the code that makes the site work, basically) had been publicly posted on Github.
Twitter filed a copyright claim and had the code taken down last Friday, but according to the Times, it had been public on the site for “several months,” posted by a mysterious, unidentified user named “FreeSpeechEnthusiast.”
The big concern here for Twitter, both as a company and as a social platform, is that public source code could make it easier for ne’er-do-wells to exploit the service. Twitter has already been rife with high-profile hacks over the last couple of weeks, as accounts belonging to the dude from Duck Dynasty and the band Smash Mouth were stolen and used for MacBook sale scams.
Between that and Twitter turning off text-based two-factor authentication last week, it hasn’t been a banner month for security on the site.
Twitter asked a U.S. District Court in northern California to force Github to identify whoever posted the code to its site. Company executives handling an internal investigation of the leak believe it was possibly someone who left the company recently, The New York Times reports. With Twitter layoffs impacting thousands of employees since Elon Musk bought the company last year, it doesn’t seem to be a massive leap in logic.
