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Billions of public Discord messages might have been leaked by a website Spy.pet as per recent reports. The site has an infamous track record of sweeping information of users and then selling them for money. It has gained a reputation for being a marketplace of user information that can be used for malicious intentions.
Reports published on The Register suggest that over 620 million users and 14,000 Discord chat servers have been compromised, and the information is being sold on the portal. Interestingly, access to the site's top-tier "enterprise" option is targeted at "federal agents" and those interested in "training an AI model with Discord messages."
For now, the social media platform has launched an investigation into Spy.pet to check if any action needs to be taken to harvest billions of Discord messages. The site has announced its intentions to take "appropriate steps" if it feels access to the messages may harm its user base.
Billions of Discord messages are now selling on the internet — How to protect yourself?
Given a huge chunk of Discord messages are now readily available to anybody for a fee, it is crucial to take some steps to protect your online privacy. There isn't much you can do to protect your privacy anymore, however. All the data is already with Spy.pet.
For additional insight, here's how much of your Discord data might have been leaked online: account handle, pronouns, accounts connected to Discord (like Facebook, Steam, YouTube, Battle.net, and others), list of servers you have joined, and public messages.
To view someone's profile, an individual will have to pay in cryptocurrency. Spy.pet is operating based on a credit system, with each credit costing a cent. A full profile view will cost you 10 credits, or 10 cents.
It is important to note that private messages haven't been spoofed by Spy.pet. For now, a quick password reset and restricting the amount of information shared in public messages thus seems to be the best bet to protect your security online.
Given the track record of how the US government has handheld data harvesting spoofs in the past, we can expect this to escalate. The FTC recently launched a lawsuit against social media giant Meta for similar allegations.
