In another embarrassing development for new Twitter boss Elon Musk, court documents released on Friday reveal that parts of the social media site’s source code – the core programming that makes Twitter possible – has been leaked online, the New York Times reports.
According to court filings, Twitter alleged copyright infringement in an effort to have the offending code removed from the collaborative programming network Github, where it was posted. Although the code was removed on the same day, details of how long the code had remained in place were not made available, nor the extent or depth of the leak. As part of the withdrawal request recalls Raytheon’s famously failed court-sanctioned doxxing attemptTwitter also asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to order Github to reveal both the identity of the user who posted the code and those who viewed and downloaded it.
THE NOW reports that, according to company sources familiar with the internal investigation into the leak, Twitter executives strongly suspect it was the work of a disgruntled employee who left “during the last year “. Coincidentally, Elon Musk bought Twitter last October for the exorbitant price of $44 billion and proceeded to lay off and otherwise lose 80% of the company’s staffnot the 75 percent who everyone feared that Musk would act before his purchase.
The executive who met with the NOW are primarily concerned that revelations gleaned from the stolen code could bolster future hacking efforts, either by exposing new exploits or giving bad actors access to Twitter user data. If the increasingly finicky page functionality was not enough to send the site’s user base running for the hills that the site upsurge in crooks and white nationalists since Elon takeover hasn’t scared off already, will the threat of an outright hack be the last straw for advertisers and users alike?
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