Twitter issued a DMCA infringement notice to GitHub on Friday to take down the repository that contained its proprietary source code leaked for several months. Twitter learned about the leak recently and filed a petition in the District Court of Northern California regarding the same.
GitHub has already abided by the notice and is now hunting for the perpetrator who leaked source codes under the handle of “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” mocking the Twitter head as he refers to himself as a free speech absolutist. The subpoena mandates GitHub to reveal the name, address, contact information, social media profile, and IP address of the perpetrator. The GitHub account of the perpetrator is still active.
Twitter takes down source code leaked online, hunts for downloaders
Twitter’s assistant general counsel, Julian Moore, also said that they have demanded GitHub to provide relevant information about who has accessed and downloaded the leaked codes.
Twitter’s DMCA notice to GitHub read, “Request to provide evidence of access history related to this repo.”
The leakage of Twitter’s codes might have been deliberately done at this point when Musk is already planning to open-source the algorithm of the platform to suggest tweets by March 31.
Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2023
A general investigation conducted at Twitter has suggested that the people responsible for the leak might be those who were fired the previous year by the company. The unauthorized public disclosure of Twitter’s codes and internal tools could lead to potential security vulnerability issues.
Twitter’s ex-head of security, Peiter Zatko, had earlier criticized Twitter’s cybersecurity provisions. He revealed illegally that the platform was subject to foreign government interferences and had weaker control over the employee’s access to sensitive data.
The micro-blogging site has been undergoing a roller-coaster ride ever since its acquisition by Musk and has a depreciated value of $20 billion; however, Musk aims to raise its value to $250 billion one day.
