Fakoyejo OlalekanThe owner and Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, Elon Musk, is in court over a breach of the company’s source code, on which the social media firm runs.
According to reports on Monday, 26 March 2023, Twitter approached a court on Friday, 24 March 2023, to compel GitHub to release information about the person that posted the firm’s code on GitHub’s platform.
Software developers use GitHub to share computer code for the benefit of other developers. It is an open-source community to access control, bug tracking and software feature requests.
The source code stolen from Twitter was leaked on GitHub, and it has been on the platform for several months. It was taken down after Twitter sent a copyright infringement notice to GitHub.
However, Musk wants to know the identity of the individual involved in the leak of the source code, which if accessed by the wrong person, could put Twitter at risk of more breaches, including stealing of data of the social media users, as well as taking down the site.
Aside from Twitter, companies like Microsoft and Google, amongst other major tech companies, have had their source code stolen.
Although the identity of the individual is not yet known, Twitter believes that the person or persons are former employees of the social media firm.
Findings from Twitter’s internal investigation showed that the individual could have left the company in 2022, foreign media outlets reported.
To put a face to the mystery people that could have downloaded the source code, Twitter approached the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to force GitHub to release details of the downloaders, Musk’s company said in a court filing.
Meanwhile, the court battle to obtain the identity of people involved in the stolen source code comes at a period Musk is still trying to reshape Twitter.
He sacked some employees to restructure Twitter, reduce costs and save the firm’s earnings. Some employees also quit following his acquisition of Twitter last year October. However, it wasn’t stated if the individual that leaked the source code is among the employees sacked or that quit.
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