Twitch has reportedly suffered a massive data breach revealing its source code, an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios, and other information from as recently as Oct. 4.
Video Games Chronicle (VGC) reports that a 4chan user publicly shared the compromised data by way of a 125GB torrent link. An anonymous source confirmed the legitimacy of the leaked data, VGC says, and indicated that Twitch is aware of the incident. But the company has not yet responded to our request for comment or publicly acknowledged the breach.
The leaked data is said to include the source code used in the primary Twitch platform as well as its client apps for desktop PCs, video game consoles, and mobile devices; information about proprietary software development kits and Amazon Web Services offerings used by the service; and data from Twitch-owned properties such as the Internet Games Database and CurseForge.
There are also signs that encrypted passwords were leaked, so many Twitch users have posted about changing their passwords in response to the breach. (If you’re one of them, and if you’ve used that password for multiple accounts, be sure to change those passwords as well.) Others have started to enable multi-factor authentication on their accounts as a precaution.
But much of the conversation about the leak has focused on two revelations: The amount of money Twitch has paid out to streamers each month going back to 2019, which appears to be more than many people suspected, even though much of that information is at least semi-public; and the Steam competitor dubbed “Vapor” that Amazon Game Studios is said to be working on.
It would make sense for Amazon to introduce a true Steam alternative. The company is mostly known for selling things to people; why not sell them PC games? Twitch has already dabbled with selling games via Twitch Games Commerce, and now that Amazon has shown increasing interest in the gaming market, having another go at Steam doesn’t seem particularly unusual.
As always with data breaches like this, be wary about downloading files that claim to be related to this data dump, and recognize that scammers might take advantage of the situation by conducting Twitch-related phishing attacks. Don’t click on links in unsolicited emails!
