Anna’s Archive claims it obtained metadata for around 256 million tracks and audio files for roughly 86 million songs, totaling close to 300 TB. Reportedly, this represents about 99.9% of Spotify’s catalog and roughly 99.6% of all streams.
Spotify says it has “identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping” and implemented new safeguards. From a security perspective, this incident is a textbook example of how scraping can escalate beyond “just metadata” into industrial‑scale content theft.
Read more…
Source: Malwarebytes Labs
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- National Lottery website brought down by cyber hack attack leaving thousands unable to buy tickets
September 30, 2017
A cyber attack brought down the the National Lottery website last night, Camelot has admitted. The website was down for more than an hour-and-a-half yesterday evening, due to a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack – when hackers flooded the website with online traffic. A Camelot spokesperson said: “Unfortunately, as experienced by many companies, The National Lottery website was subject to ...
- Two Danish ministries taken offline by cyber attack
September 28, 2017
A Turkish hacker group has claimed responsibility for a cyber attack that has rendered the Danish Ministry of Immigration website inaccessible. The Ministry of Immigration, as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, were hit Wednesday by a cyber attack thought to have come from a Turkish hacker group, reports broadcaster DR. The former ministry’s website ...
- Security experts: Iran-backed hackers targeting U.S. and Saudi Arabia
September 21, 2017
Cybersecurity firm FireEye has identified a new group of hackers, known as APT33, that it says has been working on behalf of the Iranian government since 2013. The group has “potential destructive capabilities,” FireEye warned. “The campaigns that were laid out were not just aligned with the Iranian government but with the Iranian military,” said Stuart ...
- CCleaner Malware Infects Big Tech Companies With Second Backdoor
September 20, 2017
The group of unknown hackers who hijacked CCleaner’s download server to distribute a malicious version of the popular system optimization software targeted at least 20 major international technology companies with a second-stage payload. Earlier this week, when the CCleaner hack was reported, researchers assured users that there’s no second stage malware used in the massive attack and affected users ...
- UK organisations could face huge fines for cyber security failures
August 8, 2017
British organisations could face fines of up to £17m, or 4% of global turnover, if they fail to take measures to prevent cyber-attacks that could result in major disruption to services such as transport, health or electricity networks. But the proposals, which are being considered as part of a government consultation launched on Tuesday, say that ...
- Lloyd’s says cyber-attack could cost $120bn, same as Hurricane Katrina
July 17, 2017
Lloyd’s of London has warned that a serious cyber-attack could cost the global economy more than $120bn (£92bn) – as much as catastrophic natural disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Published two months after a ransomware cyber-attack that hobbled NHS hospitals and hit nearly 100 countries, a 56-page report from the world’s oldest insurance market ...
