Mathway Hacked: Popular Math App Data Breach with 25M User Data Leak

Dark Web is a mysterious hub, something like a treasure trove of valuable information. Apart from many illegal activities like drug marketplace, dangerous hirings, phishing attacks, financial frauds, it is a cyber attackers playground, as most data dumps are sold or auctioned over here publicly. Just a couple days back, Wishbone database was first sold and then distributed for free here.

But the new meat of data breachers is the extremely popular academic application for Math enthusiasts – Mathway. The app model works as simply as sending an equation or math problem and receiving back its solved answer, completely free. It is one of the top-rated educational apps with #4 rank on Apple’s App Store, 10+ Million downloads on Google Play Store and #2,065 website rank on Alexa.

With such wide audience reach, the Mathway data breach news has become an alarming issue. Let’s take a look at the details:

Mathway Hacked – Data Leak News and Hacker Details

Since the past month, there have been many reports of Mathway databases being privately sold on various platforms like Telegram channels, hacker forums, and more marketplaces on the Dark Web.

But recently one such ad surfaced publicly on a popular dark web hacking forum, confirming the Mathway data breach. The post exhibited a sale of 25M User records of Mathway data dump for a price of $4,000 in crypto currency - Bitcoin or Monero.

Quite interestingly, Mathway data breach is the exceptional work of Shiny Hunters, who has been associated with lots of data breaches lately, like Microsoft Github Hacking, Wishbone Data Breach and more. He has also shared few details about the latest Mathway cyber attack with ZDNet, saying that the Mathway data dump was acquired in January, 2020 by accessing the app’s backend and then later scrubbing off any trace of this intrusion.

Mathway Data Breach – What Got Leaked?

Mathway’s major audience consisted of kids, teens and young students, which is a crucial concern, especially with parents.

Regarding Mathway data dump details, and what exactly got leaked, it is mainly Email Addresses and Hashed Passwords with other system data. But there’s always the possibility that the hacker has more details stored for future dealings.

We’re also receiving new updates by the minute, that now the Mathway data dump is allegedly being leaked fully for free. And multiple sources have confirmed it as authentic.

Mathway Hacked – Next Steps

Since this news has rolled out, many students and parents are panicked regarding their cyber safety. As one of the very first steps, you should immediately change your Mathway account password, and for any other account using the same/ similar password.

Additionally, we always suggest our readers (and practice ourselves) to use a password manager and create random alpha-numeric keys, different for each account.

Update:

A Mathway representative has admitted and confirmed about the data breach and promised to take necessary steps,

“At Mathway, we take our customer's trust seriously, especially when it comes to their data, and we are committed to doing what is right for our customers. We recently discovered that certain Mathway customer account data, emails and hashed and salted passwords, was acquired by an unauthorized party. Upon learning of this, we retained a leading data security firm to investigate, address any vulnerabilities and remediate the incident. We are notifying all potentially impacted customers and are requiring password resets for all accounts. We regret any inconvenience this may cause our customers.”