Reportedly, the source code remained public for several months before being taken down by GitHub.
According to a news report from the New York Times (NYT), some portions of Twitter’s source code were leaked online through GitHub after the social networking platform filed a DMCA request to take it down.
The report claims that the source code probably remained public for several months before being taken down by GitHub. It was published by a GitHub user with the username FreeSpeechEnthusiast, referring to Elon Musk’s statement that he was a Free Speech Absolutist previously.
Code-sharing service GitHub published the request online, stating that the leaked info was Twitter’s proprietary source code for internal tools and platforms. It is worth noting that the GitHub profile linked with the DMCA takedown listed a non-public code contributed in early January.
Proprietary source code is usually the most sensitive and secretive trade information. This code becoming public entails several risks for the company, such as it can disclose the platform’s software flaws that attackers can exploit.
Moreover, it gives the competitors a competitive edge by giving an insight into the company’s non-public internal workings.
Twitter also filed a court filing in California apart from requesting to take down the source code. The company submitted the filing to identify the perpetrator responsible for the leak as well as to get information on GitHub users who might have downloaded the code.
As per the filing, Twitter asked the court to order GitHub to disclose the users’ names, telephone numbers, addresses, social media profiles, IP addresses, and emails. The request was made under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act implemented in 1998.
Twitter execs suspect that one of the employees who left the company in 2022 after Elon Musk acquired the platform could be responsible for the leak. Since Musk laid off thousands of Twitter employees, it is difficult to determine the culprit as of now.