Twitch Leak Spirals Further, Passwords and Emails Leaked in Plain Text

All of the Internet has been buzzing with discussions concerning the massive Twitch leak that went online two days ago. An anonymous poster initially put up links to a massive torrent of data exfiltrated from the platform. Initially, it was thought that the leak contained the Twitch platform, application and website source code, and more or less the entirety of Twitch, but without any username or password data sets.

However, as ThreatPost reported, researchers went through the leak's massive data of over 130 gigabytes and slowly picked apart all the details. The worrying discovery they made was that Twitch content creator payouts were not the only sensitive information that was contained in the leak.

ThreatPost quotes an independent researcher who asked to remain anonymous and who found more sensitive, personally identifiable information of Twitch streamers in a chunk of the leak. The datastore contained streamer emails and passwords, stored in plain text and accessible to anyone who downloaded the leak.

This exacerbates the already sticky situation even more. The Twitch leak was one of staggering proportions and contained not just the platform's source code, but also the source code of a digital game distribution platform, which Amazon seems to have been developing, codenamed Vapor, hinting it was intended as a direct competitor to Valve Corporation' Steam - the biggest digital game store at the moment.

The most logical advice to give any Twitch user at this point, no matter if you are an active streamer or simply have an account on the platform so you can comment and participate in stream chats, would be to immediately change your password in light of the email and password leak. The platform seemed to be experiencing some further issues as we were unable to change the password on a Twitch account for several hours yesterday, getting a generic "Something went wrong. Please try again" error message.

Thankfully, we were finally able to successfully change the password of the account and would advise anyone with an account on Twitch, even those who are not active streamers, to change their passwords as well.

The massive Twitch leak also contained the payouts that the biggest names among streamers had received for a two-year period starting in 2019. The numbers were definitely an interesting insight into how much the platform's top creators make from their content. The figures listed do not include donations received directly during streams, which means the real figures those content creators make using the platform are likely significantly higher.