Twitch has suffered a huge data breach. On Wednesday, an anonymous 4chan user shared a 135GB torrent link on the site which includes a slew of internal Twitch information. Pretty much the entirety of Twitch has been leaked by an anonymous hacker.
Video game news outlet VGS seems to have been the first to report the data breach and have verified the files mentioned in the leak.
“We can confirm a breach has taken place,” Twitch said in a statement. “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.”
Twitch appears to have been targeted by the hacker.
“Jeff Bezos paid $970 million for this, we’re giving it away FOR FREE,” wrote the user, referencing Amazon’s 2014 acquisition of the live streaming platform.
They continued to explain their actions behind the leak.
“Their community is also a disgusting toxic cesspool, so to foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space, we have completely pwned them,” they said.
According to the poster, the hacked Twitch data includes:
- The “entirety” of the Twitch.tv source code from “almost 6,000 internal Git repositories” including comment history “going back to its early beginnings.”
- Mobile, desktop and console Twitch clients
- Proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch
- Properties that Twitch owns such as IGDB and CurseForge
- “Vapor,” which is an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios
- Internal “red teaming” tools, which are used by employees to test the platform’s security by emulating attacks from hackers
And, what will most likely be of greatest interest to the average Twitch consumer:
- Twitch creator payment reports from 2019 to present day
“Find out how much your favorite streamer is really making!” exclaimed the leaker in their 4chan post.
Looking at the leaked data, it appears that between August 2019 and today, 81 creators have made more than $1 million directly from Twitch. The Twitch partner income reports have been confirmed to be legitimate by numerous creators who have found themselves on the list.
It should be noted that the reports only include direct payments from Twitch and do not include revenue generated from third-party sponsorships, platforms, donations, or merchandise sales. Direct payments from Twitch would include ad share revenue, bits (Twitch’s version of in-stream donations), and channel subscriptions.
The information about a Steam competitor should also be a juicy tidbit from the leak for gamers. Codenamed “Vapor,” the unreleased project would have integrated the streaming platform’s features directly into a Twitch-run digital video game store.
According to the user who posted the information, this is only “part one” of the data leak. It’s currently unclear what other information the hacker has or if sensitive information such as passwords are involved in the data breach. The data leak comes just a little over a month after some streamers organized a boycott of the platform due to inaction over harassment and hate.
