Massive Twitch Data Breach by Anonymous Hacker

Oct 6, 2021

Twitch has confirmed that Twitch’s information security was breached, after multiple reports broke Wednesday morning that the streaming platform had been hacked. An anonymous 4chan user released a 125GB torrent earlier today that includes three years of creator payout data along with Twitch’s mobile, desktop, and console source code. It doesn’t appear user information was part of the leak, however, it's still a good idea to update passwords and security for those with a Twitch account.

The hacker stated they intended to “foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space,” and claims the Twitch community is a “disgusting toxic cesspool.” The data posted today was labeled as “part one,” which implies more information could be shared in the near future.

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Along with three years worth of Twitch creator payout information, the leak also included:

The entirety of twitch.tv, “with commit history going back to its early beginnings.”
Source code for the mobile, desktop, and console clients.
Code related to proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch.
An unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios.
Data on other Twitch properties like IGDB and CurseForge.
Twitch’s internal security tools.

To explain this further, commit history is a compiled archive of changes and revisions made to the site. SDK stands for software development toolkit and is a set of software tools and programs that developers can use to build applications for specific platforms. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, which Twitch uses to run various functions on the platform.

It’s recommended that if you haven’t changed your passwords on IGDB or CurseForge in the last year, to do so now, just in case.

Coming just one week after Twitch announced upcoming security features to help combat against hate raids and bot accounts, this hack could set back that progress by months. The specific motive or catalyst for the hacker is unknown, but they did use #DoBetterTwitch to promote the leak. This was a hashtag heavily used by those who protested Twitch in August for the company’s lack of action towards the ongoing hate and harassment on the platform.

While personal data wasn't included in this leak, that doesn't mean that it won't be included in the next one.

Here are a few ways to help strengthen your account security:

Turn on Two-Factor Authentication
Use a password that’s difficult to guess that includes numbers, symbols, and capitalized lettering
Connect through secure Wi-Fi
Change your password every 90 days

Twitch tweeted out a confirmation that it suffered a major data breach. They stated, “Our teams are working with urgency to understand the extent of this. We will update the community as soon as additional information is available.”

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