ptkovsky
The North American video game streaming service known as Twitch, which is a subsidiary of Amazon, was just recently breached again by unknown hackers.
We reported earlier some of the peculiar details about the loud international scandal that broke out only a few days ago, when many news outlets on the web posted their articles about the recent security incident at Twitch.
Initial breach
It was initially stated that an anonymous user made a 4chan post, revealing some of the apparently stolen information from the NA’s biggest gaming and esports matches streaming service.
The leak seemed to be containing major intellectual property and confidential data that included information about financial, developmental, and other sensitive data belonging to Amazon’s internet television company.
The leaker also stated that with the abovementioned actions the hackers wanted to contribute to creating a more competitive environment in today’s somewhat monopolized internet video streaming market.
Current deface
During the most recent Twitch breach, the hackers began interacting with the Amazon service’s front end. They were seen changing the background images for some of the gaming and esports titles on the main Twitch’s website.
The main backgrounds of some of the games and categories listed on the website were basically defaced, and they began displaying Jeff Bezos’ astounded face.
Multiple sources recorded videos and made screenshots of the main Amazon website’s page for titles such as Back 4 Blood, which is the survival first person shooter from the creators of Left 4 Dead series. The smaller Twitch section of the upcoming Turtle Rock Studios’ title has about 100k subscribers on Amazon’s video game streaming platform.
Importantly, some of the internet news media stated that the main background images were also modified in case of many other much bigger video games, such as one of the most popular esports titles in the world — Dota 2, which is currently hosting one of the biggest events in the world — The International 10.
Valve’s game currently has more than 15.2 million followers on the Twitch website. And, for example, another very popular PC title on Twitch — GTA 5, which has almost 50 million followers, was also reportedly defaced.
It is suggested that the unknown hackers were able to obtain access rights to work directly with Twitch’s APIs, due to the fact that Amazon’s video streaming platform was recently heavily compromised.
The administrators of Amazon’s platform later reportedly were able to delete the fake pictures that were placed on the abovementioned gaming and esports title’s headers. The fake images were located on the Amazon company’s own CDN servers.
Cache poisoning
There is an alternative opinion, which states the hackers are actually exploiting one of the caching mechanics known as cache poisoning technique.
In this suspected case, the admin controls of the website and its backend seem to be currently untouched. Though, the compromised website can be modified in a dangerous way for the end user, including possible redirects to other potentially malicious or phishing websites.
Streaming services wars
Amazon is known as one of the largest IT companies in the world. The American global conglomerate famously belongs to the list of Big Five companies in the United States, which also includes names such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.
Many of these IT companies headquartered in the US are very interested, currently have, or already had their ventures in the modern and promising market of internet streaming, such as Apple’s TV+ service, YouTube with their Gaming and Premium services, Cupertino’s MS with their former Mixer project, and also Facebook Gaming.
The other Amazon’s alternative streaming platform titled Prime Video happens to be one of the most popular video streaming services in the world. It is sitting on par or next to other big US’ companies offering their services in this field, such as Netflix, Disney, HBO, Apple, etc.
Amazon seems to be doing fine at least for now. It was previously reported by multiple sources that Amazon’s Prime Video service had acquired more than 175 million members, according to the recent statistics dating back to April 2021.