Porn site hacked! The names of nearly 800,000 registered users of porn site Brazzers were exposed in a data breach in September of 2016. The account details were taken from the site’s chat forum where porn fans discuss their favorite scenes and performers.
VICE News website Motherboard first reported on the massive hack, revealing that the personal information of the porn site’s users was passed to it by Vigilante.pw, a site that monitors internet breaches and reveals as much information as possible about the hacks. The dump of data includes email addresses, user names and passwords spelled out in plain text. Many sites typically digitally scramble or encrypt passwords to protect them even if they do go astray, but the porn site did not have these security measures in place.
Security researcher Troy Hunt confirmed that the data in the hack was accurate. He told Motherboard that the release of the data was potentially more embarrassing than just knowing someone was a member of a porn site because, if someone used the stolen logins, they could see private conversations about sexual preferences.
“Problem with a hack like that is it’s a forum,” he said. “Worse than just adult website credentials, this is what people were talking and fantasizing about.”
In a statement, Brazzers confirmed that the breach occurred through their software used to keep the forum running. Mr. Hunt said the widely used software was often poorly maintained by forum administrators who did not apply the latest security patches leaving sites vulnerable to attack. The porn site says it has taken “corrective measures” to protect users and stop usernames and passwords from being re-used.
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Last year, there were over 21 billion visits to Pornhub, one of the world’s most popular porn sites. This staggering figure is up from 18 billion visitors in 2014. The site had almost 88 billion videos viewed in the span of the past year. How does this site have such in depth analytics? Well because they track it of course.
And they’re not the only ones.
It is always difficult for studies to get a truly accurate number when evaluating the percentage of porn users because many don’t admit to their behind-closed-door searches. But as detailed in another fascinating article on VICE’s Motherboard, the porn watchers of America may not have a say in whether their porn habits stay a secret anymore, thanks to new-age online tracking and browser fingerprinting. Porn watchers everywhere are being tracked, and if software engineer Brett Thomas is right, it would be easy to out them, along with an extensive list of what videos they’ve watched.
“If you are watching porn online in [2016], even in incognito mode, you should expect that at some point your porn viewing history will be publicly released and attached to your name,” Thomas proclaimed in a blog post titled “Online Porn Could Be the Next Big Privacy Scandal.”
How exactly could that happen? Well, it’s easier (and even more unsettling) than you think. Read the full article here.
