The New York Times source code leaked by a 4chan user - Stack Diary
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A user on the online forum 4chan has leaked a massive 270GB of data belonging to The New York Times. This leak includes the source code for the newspaper’s digital operations. The user who posted the data claimed that The New York Times has over 5,000 source code repositories, less than 30 of which are encrypted. The leaked data is said

A user on the online forum 4chan has leaked a massive 270GB of data belonging to The New York Times. This leak includes the source code for the newspaper’s digital operations.

Here are some other findings we can confirm:

  • The leak does have the original source code of the game Wordle, which the NY Times acquired in 2022.
  • The leak includes a dated WordPress database of 1,500 NY Times Education site users. The database contains names and surnames, email addresses, and hashed passwords. You should expect it to be added to HIBP shortly.
  • Several folders contain internal communications from NY Times Slack channels.
  • Times uses various machine learning algorithms and NLP techniques/scripts for its services.
  • Many exposed authentication methods exist, including authentication URLs and their respective passwords, secret keys, and API tokens. The majority are well protected, but plenty of such secrets need immediate attention. We have also seen private user keys used for authentication.
  • There are a lot of details about internal NY Times architecture from a software development point of view.

So far, it is difficult to say whether the NY Times will need to reset the passwords for everyone who is a member of its site.

It’s worth pointing out that this leak appears to involve data from The New York Times’s IT/infrastructure/website organization rather than the news organization composed of reporters. In media companies, these two entities are largely separate. The IT/infrastructure team handles the technical aspects of the website and digital operations, while the news organization manages reporting and editorial content.

  • RION [she/her]English
    67•4 months ago

    Several folders contain internal communications from NY Times Slack channels.

    My body is ready

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]English
    28•4 months ago

    the source code that serves up news content is 500 MB.

    the rest is for interactive pop ups and mobile layout breaking, random spontaneous, invisible click boxes to makenit so you accidentally activate an ad when trying to watch, pause, close or otherwise interact with a video.

    it is some of the most cutting edge website complicating code ever written.

    • dch82English
      1•4 months ago

      500MB? What the heck? That’s literally 350 or so floppies or so many win95 installs

    • What_Religion_R_They [none/use name]English
      1•4 months ago

      Horse’s mouth:

      “It’s the NYTs, they have way more dirty laundry than that. Show us the memos about deposing world leaders the feds don’t like or gaslighting people about border security and refugee violence. Show us the big donations from the cccp to ignore crimes against humanity.”

      they’re so fucking stupid

  • Awoo [she/her]English
    16•4 months ago

    So do we think this is a random person or?

    Every leak that specifically happens on 4chan I tend to assume is a cia op that uses 4chan because they want to promote it.

    • Nakoichi [they/them]English
      18•4 months ago

      Either that or it’s where people go to leak shit from inside. Wouldn’t rule out this being some rogue comrade.

    • glans [it/its]English
      19•4 months ago

      the article links to this list of repos https://files.catbox.moe/jx7ksm.txt and says is 6200 lines long.

      i am not framiliar enough with this kind of development to know if this is a reasonable structure for this kind of large project. anyone?

      • flan [they/them]English
        17•4 months ago

        Looks like they put each of their modules in a separate repo. This wouldn’t be a single project. NYTimes is a pretty huge operation. They obviously have their website but they also have apps, infrastructure to ingest and process whatever media they get, infrastructure for ads, games, security (lol), user account management, billing, legal, etc etc.

        it’s possible this is organized differently in their source control and it appears kinda disorganized because we’re looking at it flattened.

    • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]English
      31•4 months ago

      Something weird about that figure. Branches within repos maybe, otherwise those are mostly junk or their supply chain attack security requirements had them cloning and building themselves the repos of every open source library they’ve ever used for vulnerability scans.

    • blobjim [he/him]English
      10•4 months ago

      It’s probably just every repository name on their spurce control management server. Users can usually create their own repositories whenever. So a bunch if these could just be random little experiments or side projects people made.