Under the orders of Elon Musk, Twitter has launched a manhunt to find and identify whoever leaked part of its source code last week. And everything indicates that the social network is one step closer to discovering who was in charge of committing this act.
The company sent a court order to GitHub to disclose all personal information linked to the FreeSpeechEnthusiast account, which posted the Twitter source code to its online repository. Bloomberg reports that the firm belonging to Microsoft has until April 3 —that is, next Monday— to comply with the requirement.
He official document indicates that GitHub should provide names, phone numbers, email addresses, IP addresses and social media data of all the people linked to the aforementioned profile, which leaked the Twitter source code. In addition, submission of all related identifiable information is requested for billing or administrative purposes.
But the scope of the injunction filed by Elon Musk’s company doesn’t stop there. Twitter also wants the personal data of “all users who posted, uploaded, downloaded, or modified the data” from FreeSpeechEnthusiast’s public repository.
Elon Musk, on the hunt for whoever leaked the Twitter source code
The leak of part of Twitter’s source code became known last Sunday, through a report from The New York Times. However, there are still no details about when the extraction of the software in question could have taken place. What is a fact is that the code appeared on githubwhich forced the social network to move quickly to request its removal.
Last Friday, the Microsoft platform took down the FreeSpeechEnthusiast public repository for copyright infringement. The main concern within Twitter is that the leaked code contains security vulnerabilities that allow attacks against the platform. Or, even worse, that they facilitate the extraction of personal data from users.
Twitter has already launched an internal investigation to try to determine where the information came from. However, the company is operating with just a fraction of the employees it used to have until a few months ago. Therefore, security experts consider it unlikely that they will be able to identify the perpetrator before GitHub submits the requested information.
The curious thing about the leak is that it occurred a few days before the date on which Twitter was supposed to release part of its code. In the middle of this month, Elon Musk reported that the code used to recommend tweets would be made open source March 31. “Providing transparency in code will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to a rapid improvement in the quality of recommendations. Most importantly, we look forward to earning your trust.” Indian the tycoon.
However, there is a significant disbelief regarding Elon Musk’s promises regarding dates. The owner of Twitter I had already promised February 21 that he would “release his algorithm before the end of the week”, something that never happened. It remains to be seen if this Friday at least a part of the “entrails” of the platform does become open source, or if we will have to continue waiting.