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.
Oh no. Now they know the aliased email address, unique password, and that I didn’t try very hard to learn spanish.
(please note: this is a joke, I don’t see anything about them getting passwords)
Something to note here - with AI, if you’re using any sort of heuristic for your password, it’s pretty simple to work out a pretty good set of possibilities which makes brute force even easier and puts you at risk across the board.
Always come up with random passwords that are as random as possible. If there’s a path you took to get to a password, in theory it can be worked backward.
For example I know some people who only change a single letter when changing their passwords which is ultimately trivial to guess if the old password was compromised (hence the need to change the password or the need to proactively work against this possibility)
I wish more websites allowed random words as passwords instead of forcing numbers and special characters (but not THAT special character, you have to use one of the ones on this list).
People change their passwords by one letter or digit because they’re tied to these restrictive formats. If 5-6 random words was the norm, people would update more than just one character when needing to change passwords.
“poison navy series ruler handshake papaya” is a fantastic password.
“Ilovemygrandkids!123” is a horrible password.
Just use a password manager and a unique, long, random generated password for every site. There’s no need or reason to know the password to anything other than your password manager and your primary email.
in like a decade the use of a password manager will be a bad idea. i don’t know how but it will be.
Hmm, a single point of access for every password you have? I don’t see the problem…
Lucky until we get actual quantum computing, it’s not worth the years on a supercomputer to crack a single stolen set of encrypted passwords.
The thing is the average person either can’t or can’t be bothered to remember even a dozen actually secure passwords, so they fall back to a couple of simple derivations of a common password, meaning each and every site a user signs up on represents an additional single point of failure.
That’s a good point.
You know somebody has to link this.
That’s why I use IncorrectBatteryHorseStaple
They’ll never figure that one out
You immediately know that they’re not handling your passwords correctly when they block certain characters.
Agreed! I also think that the next steps would be getting rid of the need for users to even know their own password and instead replace with other securities like biometrics (with sufficient permutations possible to match or exceed passwords) and a physical device or something else entirely that removes the need to let the user in on what the exact password is
Tools like Bitwarden will let you fairly customize the randomly generated password it makes. You can tailor it to not use certain characters for those sites that don’t allow it. And each vault object can be customized like that independently so you don’t compromise all your passwords by not allowing _ or (, you can also have it do pass phrases like you gave an example of
I use a heuristic to update my main passwords. It’s not a character but easily guessable if you see it in plaintext and now you’ve made me facepalm my actions.
I only use that for certain things because I use Google Oauth or Bitwarden for most things and you’ve just woken me up about what could be exposed.
The goal should usually be as random as possible, if it’s got a series of steps to create, they can be traced backward
Now the trick I’m not telling you is that randomness is hard to get because you need a sufficient amount of entropy (basically just means randomness, chaos, formally it’s how much uncertainty there is in the system) to ensure that it’s strong enough which can be challenging sometimes. For example, if your password is only 3 characters long and has 10 possibilities for each spot in the string, you’re only looking at 10^3 possibilities to guess accurately which is nothing to pcs and people with time on their hands haha
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Do the people that release these get paid somehow? Or do they just do it for hacker cred and say fuck these 2.6M people?
In January 2023, someone was selling the scraped data of 2.6 million DuoLingo users on the now-shutdown Breached hacking forum for $1,500.
…
As first spotted by VX-Underground, the scraped 2.6 million user dataset was released yesterday on a new version of the Breached hacking forum for 8 site credits, worth only $2.13.
“Today I have uploaded the Duolingo Scrape for you to download, thanks for reading and enjoy!,” reads a post on the hacking forum.
HODL, the value will go up again for sure
This part is also, ummm, interesting…
BleepingComputer has confirmed that this API is still openly available to anyone on the web, even after its abuse was reported to DuoLingo in January.
They’ll send fake emails where the green owl comes to collect “late fees” for your 216-day streak of missed Spanish lessons.
We’ve been trying to reach you about your language course’s extended warranty…
You’ll have to pay with Bed Bath and Beyond gift cards.
Both.
Next email from duo: give me your credit card details
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“Mi Numero del Seguridad Social es…”
Damn, they’ll know I didn’t finish that Spanish lesson the bird bothered me about!
They’ll know I’m ~1800 days into French and still shit at it.
The shame!
Salut! Enchanté, ça va bien?
Je vais bien, et vous?
Très bien!
Bonjour!
That means “‘Sup?”
I hope they don’t fucking send me spam.
Depending on how far you got, you might not understand it anyway.
Quieres una gran verga? Haz click aquí!!!
Mucho dinero en tu futuro! USD$80,000,000,000 Euro!
That’s the thing that annoys me most about Duolingo: if they’re going to show you ads, the least they could do is show you ones in the language you’re trying to learn instead of your native one.
estamos jodidos señor búo
“Scraped” data suggests that it’s data available on public profile pages. However, the article also says the dump is a mix of public and non-public info. So which is it, scraped or not? It’s an important distinction, because data collection by scraping is technically not a breach.
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.
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.
I pray for whoever pisses off the duolingo bird
Oh no, not my German and Japanese scores!!!
I guess the email could become a spam target?? Gmail does a good job sorting that for me.
They know your email, your name, and that you’ve taken German anf Japanese. Next they use that information to craft a phishing email that only the very stupid would fall for, which fools an alarming number of people. Something like “Hi, this is Duolingo suppert, and your billing information may have been comprimised. Log into this portal with your credit card credentials to confirm that you were not affected.”
How is that API still up after this has happened?
I only see this comment, but it says 53 comments. I just want to know why they didn’t tell their userbase.
Is there a list on what data exactly got leaked, that wasn’t public before?
However, Duolingo did not address the fact that email addresses were also listed in the data, which is not public information.
From the Article, emphasis by me
Rip my email I use specifically for organizations I don’t trust
I’m so glad I switched to duck email. Might as well changes it again and block the old email.
DDG email is AMAZING! I only wish it would have been around before my email got exposed.
Only one thing to do… Start over fresh.
I just did this a few months ago, and it feels really good to have a proper set-up now, with privacy respecting companies all around.
I’m in the process of doing that. It’s not a quick and easy process. I was so lazy with password, that I would just use a variation of 3 different passwords for everything because that’s all I could remember. Then I had a password exposed, so I decided to change all my passwords to unique passwords and use a password manager. I was shocked to see that I had 126 passwords saved in my browser. That took a long time to go through and change the email and passwords to everything.
I totally understand you. It’s indeed quite an enormous task.
I’ve been on the internet for 20 years, and just like you I used to use the same username, email, and password for everything. Slight variations for some stuff, but generally the same.
A couple of years ago, I took the problem by the root, and went into my browser’s saved passwords, which I’ve migrates over a couple of times from Chrome and Firefox.
I was shocked to find over 1200 unique entries, scattered over so many sites. Many of them I did not even recognize.
I took it from the top and went down the list. Every site I would open, sign in to, and then change the password. If the site did not exist any longer, I would just remove it. If the site looked spammy, I would delete my account. If I couldn’t find a way to delete my account, I would change the email.
Took me around 3 days to get through the list. There were quite a few duplicates, but also many that just didn’t exist. Ended up with around 500 entries, which I then exported and out into my new password manager Bitwarden.
It feels good getting it done, but I also understand it’s a daunting task. To me it was fun to relieve some of the memories from my childhood.
I’m really confused on what you’re responding to
Why did you choose DDG mail over Addy?
Because this is the first time I’ve heard of Addy. I saw your comment and downloaded the app from F-Droid. I’ll see how it compares to DDG. Do you know of any advantages over DDG?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/-nplKmsqozA?si=8Y9Xpvzdltr0QqH8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Live learn and share right! 😉
oh non!
