Billions of scraped Discord messages up for sale

Four billions public Discord messages are for sale on an internet scraping service called Spy.pet. At first sight there doesn’t seem to be much that is illegal about it. The messages were publicly accessible and there are no laws against scraping data. However, it turns out the site did disregard...

A Close Up Look at the Consumer Data Broker Radaris

If you live in the United States, the data broker Radaris likely knows a great deal about you, and they are happy to sell what they know to anyone. But how much do we know about Radaris? Publicly available data indicates that in addition to running a dizzying array of people-search websites, the...

Why Bad Bots Are the Digital Demons of the Internet

In the dimly lit corners of the internet, where shadows flicker and eerie silences prevail, there lurks entities of malevolent intent. They are not the stuff of old wives tales or campfire ghost stories. We’re talking about bad bots, the digital bogeymen of the digital age. These nefarious beings...

2.6 million DuoLingo users have scraped data released

An unknown party has released the scraped data of 2.6 million DuoLingo users on a hacking forum. While they offered the data set for sale in January for $1,500, it's now been released on a new version of the Breached hacking forum for 8 site credits, worth only $2.13. DuoLingo is an educational...

API Abuse – Lessons from the Duolingo Data Scraping Attack

It’s been reported that 2.6 million user records sourced from the Duolingo app are for sale. The attacker apparently obtained them from an open API provided by the company. There’s a more technical explanation available here. While we talk a lot about the vulnerabilities in the OWASP API Top-10 a...

"TootRoot" Mastodon vulnerabilities fixed: Admins, patch now!

One of Twitters big rivals, Mastodon, recently finished fixing four issues which in the worst case allowed for the creation of files on the instances server. Mastodon, whose main selling point is lots of separate communities living on different servers yet still able to communicate, was notified ...

Class-Action Lawsuit for Scraping Data without Permission

I have mixed feelings about this class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that it "scraped 300 billion words from the internet" without either registering as a data broker or obtaining consent. On the one hand, I want this to be a protected fair use of public data. On the other...

Introducing Integrated API Abuse Prevention to Combat Bad Bots

In recent years theres been a rise in "API Abuse" attacks, which includes detrimental automated behaviors such as malicious bots, account takeover ATO, credential stuffing, application layer L7 DDoS, data scraping, and more. For instance, in April-2021 malicious actors scraped the personal data o...

Former TikTok exec: Chinese Communist Party had "God mode" entry to US data

A former executive at TikToks parent company ByteDance has claimed in court documents that the Chinese Communist Party CCP had access to TikTok data, despite the data being stored in the US. The allegations were made in a wrongful dismissal lawsuit which was filed in May in the San Francisco...

"2.6 million DuoLingo account entries" up for sale

Not a week goes by where we dont see an example of data scraping causing concern for both business and folks at home. The latest target happens to be popular language platform DuoLingo, who is currently digging into a forum post concerning data related to its customer accounts. Scraping data for...

Meta Fined €265 million in Facebook Data Scraping Case in the EU

By Habiba Rashid The incident led to the publication of data on Irish police, sitting judges, prison officers, social workers, journalists, and others, leading to a spike in scam calls and texts in Ireland. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Meta Fined €265 million in Facebo...

Fake CISO Profiles on LinkedIn Target Fortune 500s

Someone has recently created a large number of fake LinkedIn profiles for Chief Information Security Officer CISO roles at some of the worlds largest corporations. Its not clear whos behind this network of fake CISOs or what their intentions may be. But the fabricated LinkedIn identities are...

Breach Exposes Users of Microleaves Proxy Service

Microleaves, a ten-year-old proxy service that lets customers route their web traffic through millions of Microsoft Windows computers, recently fixed a vulnerability in their website that exposed their entire user database. Microleaves claims its proxy software is installed with user consent, but...

Improve Your Hacking Skills with 9 Python Courses for Just $39

For anyone with interest in cybersecurity, learning Python is a must. The language is used extensively in white hat hacking, and professionals use Python scripts to automate tests. It also has a use in the "soft" side of cybersecurity — like scraping the web for compromised data and detecting bug...

Massive LinkedIn Phishing, Bot Attacks Feed on the Job-Hungry

Emotionally vulnerable and willing to offer up any information that lands the gig, job seekers are prime targets for social engineering campaigns. And with the “Great Resignation” in full swing, cybercriminals are having an easy time finding their next victim. Just since Feb. 1, analysts have...

The 5 Most-Wanted Threatpost Stories of 2021

As 2021 draws to a close, and the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, it’s time to take stock of what resonated with our 1 million+ monthly visitors this year, with an eye to summing up some hot trends gleaned from looking at the most-read stories on the Threatpost site. While 2020 was all about...

Facebook sues Ukrainian man for scraping and selling 178m users’ data

By Deeba Ahmed Facebook tracked down the programmer after he mistakenly used the same username and contact information on email and job portals. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Facebook sues Ukrainian man for scraping and selling 178m users data...

A hacker is selling 700 million LinkedIn users accounts

By Waqas LinkedIn has not suffered data breach but the records being sold are collected through data scraping technique. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: A hacker is selling 700 million LinkedIn users accounts...

Data for 700M LinkedIn Users Posted for Sale

A new posting with 700 million LinkedIn records has appeared on a popular hacker forum, according to researchers. Analysts from Privacy Sharks stumbled across the data put up for sale on RaidForums by a hacker calling himself “GOD User TomLiner.” The advertisement, posted June 22, claims that 700...

Microsoft Gets Second Shot at Banning hiQ from Scraping LinkedIn User Data

The U.S. Supreme Court has granted LinkedIn another legal option to try to prevent rival hiQ Labs from scraping public information from its user profiles, something the Microsoft-owned professional networking platform has claimed is a violation of user privacy and a misuse of its data. The court...