Displaying items by tag: api abuse

Duolingo, is a language learning site (not to be confused with an LLM) and has a very large base of users. The site is a good target for attackers that might want to take advantage of that user base. This is something that apparently happened sometime before January 2023 with a cache of user data showed up on the now defunct Breached hacking forum. According to Duolingo, the information was listed as scraped as opposed to being part of a regular breach and Duolingo claimed the information was scraped from publicly available information.

Last week Microsoft, the FBI, and CISA made disclosed several attacks on Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies and other targets of a campaign that appeared to be driven by a new threat group out of China. The attack we detected and tracked down using internal logging available to the GCC low-side tenants and with the help of Microsoft. Fortunately, GCC (Government Cloud Computing) Low Side is not supposed to contain or pass any classified information. It is intended to be used by government agencies and contractors that do not need or have authorization to access anything more than routine sensitive information. This does not reduce the seriousness of the attack and does beg the question on how well the tenants were secured by the cybersecurity teams involved, but at least nothing National Security related was compromised.