Chegg, a U.S. education technology company serving millions of college students, suffered a data breach in April 2018 that exposed records tied to approximately 39.8 million user accounts. The breach stemmed from a misconfiguration that left subscriber data inadequately secured. No external attacker group has been publicly attributed. The exposed data included names, email addresses, usernames, and passwords. Passwords were stored as unsalted MD5 hashes, a weak and outdated format that makes them relatively easy to crack. A subset of records also contained phone numbers and home addresses. For students, those addresses were likely campus or school-year residences. The combination of crackable passwords and contact details creates serious risk of account takeover, phishing, and targeted scams that exploit academic context such as fake tutoring offers or financial aid fraud. The Federal Trade Commission investigated the breach and reached a settlement with Chegg in 2022, one of the few formal enforcement actions against an education technology company. Under the settlement, Chegg was required to implement a data security program, reduce the personal data it retains, and offer users multi-factor authentication. Chegg notified affected users and prompted password resets following the incident. People whose data was exposed should treat any associated passwords as compromised, particularly if those credentials were reused on other accounts.

Education technology platforms collect student identity, emails, subscription records, coursework activity, study behavior, payment-adjacent data, and in some cases school-linked information.

Chegg has been in significant financial difficulty following the emergence of AI-powered homework tools including ChatGPT, which directly displaced its core tutoring and homework help business. The company reported substantial revenue declines starting in 2023 and undertook major restructuring including workforce reductions. In 2024 Chegg considered a potential sale of the company as its stock price collapsed from earlier highs. Mathway, which Chegg acquired in 2020, has been caught in the same structural decline.