Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming service that caters to video gamers, confirmed that it has experienced a data security breach. The hack allegedly resulted in the theft of information on payout amounts to livestreamers, Twitch source code and details on a purported Steam rival from Amazon Game Studios.
In a tweet Wednesday morning, Twitch said, “We can confirm a breach has taken place. Our teams are working with urgency to understand the extent of this. We will update the community as soon as additional information is available. Thank you for bearing with us.”
Someone on Wednesday anonymously posted a data dump — totaling more than 125 gigabytes — on the message-board site 4chan. The leak was first reported by Video Games Chronicle.
According to the 4chan post, data stolen from Twitch includes three years of details on creator payouts; source code for mobile, desktop and game console Twitch clients; an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios; and Twitch’s internal security tools. The post was titled “twitch leaks part one,” suggesting there’s more data that may become public.
According to reports, the stolen trove of Twitch data does not appear to include users’ emails, passwords or other personally identifying info. Nevertheless, the streaming platform has encouraged some Twitch users to change their passwords, The Verge reported.
Reached for comment, a Twitch rep said they had no additional information at this point to provide on the incident.
The leaked Twitch code could potentially be used by malware authors to infect the platform’s userbase by possibly finding flaws in the software. But that’s unlikely because any return the attackers would get is minimal and wouldn’t be worth their effort, according to Quentin Rhoads-Herrera, director of professional services at cybersecurity provider Critical Start.
“This is more of a way to publicly humiliate Twitch and potentially lower the trust the Twitch users may have in the platform and company,” Rhoads-Herrera said.
Twitch was launched in 2011 by the co-founders of Justin.tv, one of the first websites to host livestreaming. Amazon acquired Twitch in 2014 for about $970 million. “Jeff Bezos paid $970 million for this, we’re giving it away FOR FREE,” the person who posted the stolen data wrote on 4chan.
In addition to operating its livestreaming platform, Twitch also hosts the TwitchCon community event, which will return with TwitchCon Amsterdam in July 2022 followed by TwitchCon San Diego in October 2022.
