Twitch, the streaming platform of choice for some of the most popular streaming personalities online today, was recently hacked. This resulted in a massive leak of Twitch streamers' earnings including Asmongold and xQc.
The ramifications for this are not yet fully known, but it is quickly becoming obvious that they go further than initially thought. Streamers feel more exposed and some have denied that the figures revealed as their Twitch salaries are correct. But upset fans and upset streamers may well soon be the least of Twitch's problems, at least if a recent development is any indication of the hack's consequences.
See, the leak didn't just include information about streamers' salaries, it also included Twitch's source code. This may or may not be the cause of Twitch's recent trouble, but it seems more than likely that it contributed. That trouble is an overabundance of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, specifically his image placed where it is not supposed to go. A specific image of Bezos making what can only be described as the PogChamp face was placed in the background of multiple game pages, blown up to huge proportions, instead of the regular images there.
As of this article, it is not known why this was done, although it seems to have just been a joke. No one person or organization has taken credit for the prank, and for now it seems that all of the Bezos images have been scrubbed from Twitch. Whether or not they will return or be replaced by other joke images is uncertain. Twitch said a server configuration change led to the hack, but that doesn't mean it cannot be hacked again. As mentioned above, with the source code out in the wild, it would be easier than ever now.
Fortunately for Twitch users, credit card information is not stored on the site, and Twitch insists this info is safe. Of course, the platform itself may well be in danger, since future hacks may not be as benign as this one. With Twitchcon planned to be in person, it was clear Twitch felt more secure from misfortune, but that is likely no longer the case.
Since there's nothing much the average user can do to anticipate hacks beyond changing their password and enabling two-factor authentication, most must simply wait and hope for no more hacks. After all, the reveal of Amazon's Vapor ahead of schedule is not worth the harm a hack could do to many people's livelihoods.