Even on the consumer facing side of Twitter, the now Elon Musk-owned social media platform is in for a very rocky ride. But as it turns out, things are much uglier behind the sceens, as the social media has had parts of its source code leaked online. And it was uploaded to GitHub, of all the places it could have possibly landed in.
The New York Times reports that the bird company manages to take down the leaked code via a copyright infringement notice. But while the legal notice was served over the weekend, it may have been floating around “for at least several months”, according to the report. Beyond just taking the source code down, which GitHub has complied, the social media’s legal action includes also getting the software collaboration platform to also identify not only the people who have uploaded the code, but also those who downloaded it.
According to the report, Twitter itself was only recently made aware of the source code leak. Executives at the company did their own investigating, and determined that whoever did the deed left the company sometime last year. Which is a pretty large window, and doesn’t exactly narrow down if the perp is someone who was directly affected by the mass layoff and exodus combo immediately after Musk took over.
Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2023
As is usually the case with source code leaks, partial or otherwise, the main concern for Twitter is security. Depending on the extent that was made publicly available, those with access to it would be able to figure out where to probe to for vulnerabilities, or at least make it easier to do so. There will naturally also be outrage of user data makes it out into the wild this way. Ironically, it would be somewhat poetic, in a nasty way, if the bit of source code leaked was the bit that Musk promised to make open source by the end of the month.
(Source: NY Times)
