As reported by The New York Times, citing its sources, part of the source code of the social network Twitter has been posted on the Internet and remained in the public domain for several months.
According to the newspaper, the information was available to users on the online platform for software developers GitHub. The leak was fixed only on Friday, and the exact period during which the source code was in the public domain is still unknown.
Twitter confirmed to the media that it had indeed leaked part of the social network's source code and some server cache data. According to the company, this is a serious incident with the disclosure of intellectual property. Experts explained that one of the problems with this leak is that the posted code contained information about security vulnerabilities that could give hackers or other interested parties the means to extract user data or shut down Twitter.
In addition to demanding that GitHub remove the data, Twitter, through the Northern District of California Court, has asked the platform for the details of the user who posted some of the source code, as well as those who downloaded it.
Twitter is conducting an internal investigation, and it is believed that the person who posted the source code online left the company last year as part of a global layoff of social network developers.