Gamers all over the world awoke today to find that one of the most popular streaming services, which features big-name video game streamers such as “Ninja” drawing mass audiences to the platform every day to spend hours watching their favorite content makers play their favorite games, has suffered at the hands of a massive data breach by an “unknown” and “malicious” third party, that experts are saying is one of the most substantial data breaches that has occurred in recent times, leaving panicked service users scrambling to frantically change their passwords as soon as possible.
The popular Amazon-owned streaming service has publicly acknowledged a huge 125 GB data leak by an anonymous hacker on the 4chan message board, who claim they have leaked all of the popular streaming services data in its entirety including user details and passwords, payout amount paid by twitch to the most popular streamers and some of the source code for twitch itself!
In a statement released to the public online, a spokesperson for the popular streaming service said “As the investigation is ongoing, we are still in the process of understanding the impact in detail”, however, it appears that this data leak was caused by a twitch server configuration change that in turn was accessed by a said anonymous hacker and later as we know, leaked on 4chan. To put it simply, a human error when setting up the computers that store the streaming services data, lead to it being findable and downloadable to any hackers.
In addition to this, the document was labeled part one, which points to the potential risk for the company that the worst is yet to come, and much more could yet be leaked causing more damage to the company whose reputation will surely be crippled by what is one of the biggest data leaks of recent times!
The company seems to have been thrown into all-out panic mode, as they scramble to patch the exploit in an attempt to prevent any future leaks from being published. Experts are also racing to find out the true extent of this leak, however, it is likely this breach will be extremely damaging to twitch, not only by crippling its reputation but with thousands of streamers’ earnings being leaked, they may now leave the service in favor of the competition!
In addition to facing a loss of revenue due to streamers leaving the platform, it’s likely the popular streaming service will be hit with massive fines, and other financial sanctions in the aftermath of what is one of the biggest data breaches of recent times, especially given the companies reputation as one of the most popular streaming services in the world, with an estimated 3 million streamers, and 15 million daily users. It will also be interesting to see what kind of effect this will have on the parent company – the well-known and much loved online shopping service – Amazon. With being very publicly tied with the streaming service, this breach may very well affect sales at Amazon, with the possibility of fear their account is not safe there either!