Spotify was attacked by hackers, taking 300 TB of music data

“We have backed up Spotify’s metadata and music files. They are distributed as large torrent files (about 300 TB), grouped by popularity,” the hacker group Anna’s Archive, once famous for stealing and distributing millions of copyrighted books, announced on December 21.

The group calls itself “music archivists” and says it has archived metadata for 256 million tracks, almost all of the music on Spotify, and audio files for 86 million songs. These songs account for 99.6% of the total number of listens.

The hacker group emphasized that this is “the world’s first largest open music archive, easy for anyone with enough hard drive space to copy”. Popular songs are stored in their native 160 kbps format, while less-heard songs are encoded into smaller files to save space. However, music released after July may not be included in this archive.

Spotify admitted that the system was illegally hacked. “A third party collected public metadata and used illegal tactics to bypass DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files. We are actively investigating,” a Spotify representative told Android Authority on December 22, mentioning DRM (Digital Rights Management) – technology to control access, use and distribution of digital content for the purpose of protecting copyright, preventing unauthorized copying with encryption, managing licenses, limiting functionality, tracking user behavior, ensuring that only authorized users can use it.

A day later, Spotify’s representative continued to announce that it had “identified and disabled” malicious user accounts participating in illegal copying, and continued to monitor suspicious behavior. However, the culprit behind it as well as the exact amount of data stolen were not mentioned.

Spotify is a Swedish music streaming platform, launched in 2008. As of September, it is one of the world’s largest music streaming service providers with more than 713 million monthly active users, including 281 million paid subscribers.

Spotify allows access to a large music store with millions of songs, albums and podcasts from many countries. One of the highlights of the service is the personalized recommendation system, based on music listening data to create playlists suitable to each person’s habits.