Roughly 800,000 accounts of the popular pornography website Brazzers have been leaked to the public after a recent data breach.
The details were provided to Motherboard by breach monitoring site Vigilante.pw, which was used for verification purposes. Though the details came from the porn site"s separate messaging board "Brazzersforum," those who did not sign up for the forum can still find their details in the leak.
The data contains 790,724 unique email addresses, which includes usernames and passwords. Troy Hunt, a security researcher and creator of website Have I Been Pwned? verified the leaked information by contacting subscribers to the website, with many confirming that the data was legitimate.
“It"s unfortunate that my information was included in the breach, but that"s the risk you run making an account anywhere on the web,” stated a Brazzers user, who asked to remain anonymous, told Motherboard.
Matt Stevens, Brazzers" public relations manager said that the breach matches an incident back in 2012, which also compromised Brazzersforum. The issue happened because of the third-party "vBulletin" software, and not anything to do with Brazzers. He further explains:
“That being said, users’ accounts were shared between Brazzers and the "Brazzersforum" which was created for user convenience. That resulted in a small portion of our user accounts being exposed and we took corrective measures in the days following this incident to protect our users.”
Lastly, he promised that Brazzers is taking the privacy and safety of its users very seriously.
As of this writing, the Brazzersforum is displayed as unavailable to the public, stating that it is currently under maintenance.
Going back to Hunt, he stated that because some of the accounts were connected to the forum, the leaked data becomes more sensitive compared to a normal porn account. This is because it could contain personal and secret thoughts about certain people that they don"t really want the public to know. He states:
“When it’s solely membership of an adult website, you know the person has an interest in adult material, which, whilst potentially embarrassing, tells you very little about them. Once they’re commenting within a forum though, now you have very personal information about their intimate thoughts. We also know that forum breaches frequently include not just user credentials, but private messages as well, and those can be particularly revealing."
Those who feel that their account may have been compromised may visit the Have I Been Pwned? website, to check if your details have been included in the data leak.
It"s not the first time that people"s secret, intimate, and dirty thoughts have been shared for the masses to see online. Back in August 2015, infidelity and cheating website Ashley Madison was hacked by Impact Team, leaking over 9.7 GB of user data, potentially harming the reputations of its owners.
Source: Motherboard via Mashable