Billions of Discord chats have been harvested, set to be sold online
Discord is looking into potential violations of its terms of use
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A publically-accessible website appears to be selling a colossal database of Discord chats to the highest bidder.
The site is called Spy.pet, and claims to have obtained more than four billion public messages, made by roughly 620 million users, logged into more than 14,000 servers.
On the surface, it would seem that there was no foul play, as the data was already public-facing, as Discord is essentially an IRC, meaning that with the right bots and automation, all of the information could be harvested.
Enterprise models
As for the presentation, Spy.pet does an impressive job. It offers a profile for each individual user, which contains known aliases, connected accounts for services such asSteamor GitHub, Discord servers, and public messages. To access the profile, all a user needs to do is pay a small fee (up to $0.10) in cryptocurrency.
There is also an “enterprise” model, advertised to be used in AI model training, or for intelligence-gathering by law enforcement. For this model, however, the potential customer should reach out to the site’s admins.
It has even drawn the attention of Discord itself, which is said to be investigating the matter to see if there were any violations of its terms of service.
Despite the information being seemingly free and simply scraped from the internet, Discord is still looking into it.
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In a statement, the company said: “Discord is committed to protecting the privacy and data of our users. We are currently investigating this matter. If we determine that violations of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines have occurred, we will take appropriate steps to enforce our policies. We cannot provide further comments as this is an ongoing investigation.”
ViaThe Register
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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.
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