Kurtis Minder, GroupSense CEO, was featured in a March 27 article by the Washington Post. The article reports that some of Twitter's source code has been leaked online by a user known as "FreeSpeechEnthusiast," according to a legal filing by Twitter that is seeking to identify the leaker.
Twitter has asked a court to subpoena GitHub, where the source code was posted, to reveal the identity of the poster and anyone who downloaded the code. The alleged leak has raised concerns about the security of the site, especially after Elon Musk's large-scale layoffs at the company. Twitter has been facing numerous challenges since Musk took over, including outages, security deficiencies, and policy changes that have concerned some users.
The leak of the source code, which contains computer code that powers websites and features, could potentially expose Twitter to security vulnerabilities and hackers. However, it is unclear whether personal information is at risk. Despite the risks, Musk has previously floated the idea of making some of Twitter's code more transparent, and he plans to "open source" all of the software code that Twitter uses to recommend tweets on March 31.
Kurtis says that the potential damage of the leak will not be realized for a while, because the public is in the dark about what the source code actually contained. If the code contained potential vulnerabilities or security gaps, Kurtis claims that could be damaging to Twitter, but he thinks it is unlikely.
Cyber threats from employees or former employees are categorized as Insider Threat, which can be dangerous to organizations. Situations including mass layoffs and inflammatory remarks from company leadership can activate certain employees who want retribution. To combat insider threats, there should be strict provisioning when employees leave, making sure that access to things like source code is immediately revoked. Read the full article here for more information.