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Twitch confirms it has been the victim of a massive hack

Twitch confirms it has been the victim of a massive hack

Streaming giant Twitch has confirmed reports that it has been the victim of a colossal hack.

In a blog post on its website, the company said that "a malicious third party" had gained access to its servers following a configuration change.

This came in the wake of news – via VGC – that a 125GB torrent had appeared on 4chan on Wednesday, October 6th that featured not only Twitch's source code, but also details about how much influencers have been paid out and its desktop, mobile and console clients. That's on top of other Amazon-owned platforms IGDB and Curseforge, in addition to an unreleased Steam competitor named Vapor.

It's also possible that passwords have been leaked as part of the hack, so users are being urged to change these and maybe enable two-factor authentication. Twitch has said that credit card information hasn't been exposed due to it not being stored on its servers.

"As the investigation is ongoing, we are still in the process of understanding the impact in detail," Twitch wrote in the blog post.

"We understand that this situation raises concerns, and we want to address some of those here while our investigation continues."


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.