Twitter is conducting a thorough investigation to determine who is responsible for the recent publication of portions of its source code on GitHub, owned by Microsoft.
The code was apparently available online for quite some time until Twitter took action to remove it on Friday. The New York Times reports on this.
Authorities investigating the incident suspect the leak was triggered by a former employee of the San Francisco-based organisation who left the company the previous year.
Twitter has sent a subpoena to GitHub in an attempt to identify the source of the code leak, as well as any other parties who may have downloaded it.
On the same day that the code was leaked, it was removed from GitHub. The person who leaked the code has an active GitHub account with the username “FreeSpeechEnthusiast.”
This appears to be a direct reference to Elon Musk’s self-proclaimed position as a “free speech abolitionist.”
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The only thing the anonymous poster appeared to have posted was Twitter’s source code.
Investigators suspect the leak was caused by one of the 7,500 employees who have either left or been laid off since October when Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion.
One of the persons has been blamed by the executives for the leak.
Throughout his run of mass firings, Musk took precautions against potential sabotage by completely securing the offices and restricting engineer access to the website’s source code.
The Impact of Twitter’s Action on Africans
The possibility that the leak was created by a disgruntled former employee is also significant to African enterprises and organisations. This is because the former employee may have been out for revenge. Theft of company property by employees, such as Twitter’s source code, is not an uncommon occurrence, and it can be detrimental to the expansion and development of businesses in Africa. Twitter is not alone in this problem.
The compromised source code contains security flaws that might provide cybercriminals with the opportunity to steal data or possibly bring down Twitter entirely. Not only does the breach present a cybersecurity risk to Twitter as a company, but it also does so to the millions of users in Africa who rely on the network for communication, news, and commercial purposes.
Caution to be taken
The founders of African companies should pay attention to this tale because it serves as a cautionary tale about the significance of upholding cybersecurity measures and protecting their proprietary information from both internal and external dangers.
Especially at a time when a number of African digital firms are “streamlining business processes” by terminating staff or going entirely out of business altogether.
The news of this breach was made public just a few days after Elon Musk declared that Twitter would make the code that is used to recommend tweets available to the public on March 31. Musk had hoped that by opening up access to the code so that anyone could read it, bugs in the platform might be found and fixed so that it could be improved. The increasing number of outages, issues, and glitches that Twitter has been facing have not gone ignored by the users of the network or the businesses that advertise on it.
On March 31st, Twitter will make all of the code that is used to recommend tweets open source.