Chess.com Leak Exposes 7.3M Users, Evidence Points to Scraping

kristianp 25 points 8 comments September 14, 2026
securityaffairs.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (5 comments)

unixhero

Is scraping wrong that, is the question.

Shank

> Every record has gam_audiences and audiences_member_of populated, Google Ad Manager audience segments, with values like coach-nudge experiment groups, trial eligibility, lapsed-user cohorts and rating-band targeting. It sure seems like the evidence doesn't point to scraping to me.

sidrag22

> The data had been pulled by abusing the platform’s find-friends feature Sounds like the find-friends feature shouldn't allow access to the majority of that data unless the "friend" accepts, don't think the "scraper" got 7mil accepts just because they had access to emails... To me this is 100% a breach, even more so because its already happened once years ago to 700k, and they changed nothing to prevent it.

ed_mercer

email? Is a user's email up for grabs just like that?

TheSpacerr

Basically our data is free.

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