Data Security, Privacy

Over 4B Discord messages purportedly harvested by data scraper

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Major instant messaging and VoIP social platform Discord had over 4 billion messages from almost 620 million users stored across over 14,000 chat servers claimed to be gathered by internet data scraping site Spy.pet, The Register reports.

Harvested information has been presented through profiles that include aliases, connected accounts, and joined Discord servers, among others, which could be accessed by anyone willing to pay a fee in the form of cryptocurrency, according to Spy.pet, which is also offering an "enterprise" data access option for federal agents looking to use the information for intelligence.

Spy.pet was also noted by its operator to have been impacted by several inconsequential distributed denial-of-service attacks in February. Meanwhile, an investigation into the claims of Spy.pet is already being conducted by Discord.

"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," said a Discord spokesperson.

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