this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
550 points (99.1% liked)

Technology

59672 readers
3118 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
550
Scraped data of 2.6 million Duolingo users released on hacking forum (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
87 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The scraped data of 2.6 million DuoLingo users was leaked on a hacking forum, allowing threat actors to conduct targeted phishing attacks using the exposed information.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Take this with a pinch of salt but what I'm gathering is that it's essentially just taking people's public profiles but the Duolingo api also exposes users' e-mail addresses (and possibly other info) that isn't normally displayed as part of the user's public profile via their app.

In essence, they're exposing more data than they probably should be and users were not really aware that data was being made public - that's why people are upset about it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Ok, this makes sense -- in which case the API should not be exposing data that isn't otherwise available on the public profile, so that is significant.