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Twitch leak: Amazon's video portal downplays its data leak

2021-10-07T17:58:21.274Z


An embarrassing leak reveals how much money Twitch pays its stars. But the streaming platform communicates as if nothing bad had happened. This strategy could take revenge.


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Streaming service Twitch: Even the source code of the platform is on the network

Photo: SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images

How rich can you get through live streaming on the internet?

This is a question many people have asked themselves, from high school students emulating online entertainers like MontanaBlack to frustrated office workers.

By means of indications such as the paid subscriptions to a Twitch channel, it is easy to estimate an order of magnitude of the income of well-known live video makers.

The amount of the actual payouts is usually secret.

It has been different since Wednesday. In the course of a data leak, information about Twitch's transfers to thousands of streamers ended up on the net. And initial feedback from people who appeared in the leak themselves suggested: The information now circulating on the Internet is probably real, or at least largely real.

In the social networks, it is now possible to passionately discuss whether, for example, the more than two million dollars that the German streamers MontanaBlack and Knossi allegedly received within around two years are surprisingly high or, given their popularity, at best the expected.

And you can weigh up whether such taxable sums, to which additional income comes from sponsoring and merchandising, would be worth not being able to walk unobserved through Germany's pedestrian zones in return.

Lost control a little

The incident is embarrassing for Twitch, which belongs to Amazon and grew to be a portal for gaming recordings. Transparency was created where the service didn't want any. For example, the leak - provided the payout data is correct and complete - makes it clear that there are just three women among the portal's 100 most financially successful streamers. Or that, as was to be expected, only a very small proportion of the approximately seven million Twitch streamers worldwide can even live from their streaming income.

Video portals like YouTube prefer to keep to themselves what their respective top stars earn through advertising participations, subscriptions and donations - probably so that there is no envy among streamer colleagues or so that fans can more easily indulge the illusion that their stars are online buddies and not already millionaires.

The leak now makes Twitch look like a service that has lost control of its internals.

It also fits that the entire source code of the platform has apparently ended up in the network.

It is naive to assume that some competitor will simply copy the video portal.

But the data provide competitors, but also groups of criminal hackers, with insights into how and where Twitch could be technically vulnerable.

What does the leak mean for users?

It is still unclear how problematic or not Twitch's data leak is for the tens of millions of users of the video portal - especially since the person responsible for the leak, whose identity is unclear, is apparently on a kind of mission against Twitch. At least that's what the text accompanying the leak suggests, in which Twitch's community is referred to as a "toxic cesspool" and in which further data publications have already been promised.

Twitch itself does not even advise its users to change their passwords.

Nevertheless, this step should not be wrong, ideally combined with setting up two-factor authentication if this is not yet activated.

With this mechanism, accounts are much better secured, should user passwords end up on the network at some point.

In a statement on Wednesday evening, Twitch stressed that its own investigation into the incident was still ongoing.

So far, this check has not found any evidence that login data has been disclosed.

Twitch also mentions that credit card numbers are not stored in their entirety at all.

Twitch is belittling the incident

When it came to the question of how the data leak could even have come about, the video service said that due to an error when changing the configuration of the Twitch server, "some data" entered the Internet, which "a malicious third party" then had access to.

As if not much had happened.

It may be that the incident is ultimately annoying primarily for Twitch and its top streamers, and less so for the majority of users.

But you could also think that Twitch is trying to deliberately downplay the incident - which could cost the service further trust in the long term, for example if more leaks actually follow.

On Thursday morning, the video portal took a security measure: Twitch decided to reset all so-called stream keys, allegedly out of caution.

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2021-10-07

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