Twitter moved quickly to remove the leaked code last Friday by sending a copyright infringement notice to GitHub, an online collaboration platform for software developers where the code was posted. GitHub complied and removed the code that day. It was unclear how long the leaked code had been online, but it appeared to have been public for at least several months.
Twitter also asked the United States District Court for the Northern District of California to order GitHub to identify the person who shared the code and anyone else who downloaded it, according to the filing.
Twitter has launched an investigation into the leak and executives handling the matter have speculated that the person responsible left the San Francisco-based company last year, said two people briefed on the internal investigation. Since Musk bought Twitter in October for $44 billion, about 75 percent of the company’s 7,500 employees have been fired or resigned.
The executives only recently learned of the source code leak, the people briefed on the internal investigation said. One concern is that the code includes security vulnerabilities that could give hackers the means to extract user data or take down the site, they said.
