The dire state of cybersecurity in the current scenario is becoming a pressing concern for us all. We have yet another example of a massive data breach in the form of wildly popular porn website Brazzers. While the hack actually took place in 2012, the compromised user data has now finally hit the dark web.
The hackers seem to have targeted the company’s discussion forum, but since both the forum and the main website have a shared user account — those who haven’t signed up for the forum are still potentially at risk. The forum works on a separate URL from the main website and is used by users to discuss pornstars and their roles in different movies. This hack has reportedly compromised the data of over 800,000 user accounts.
Commenting on the data breach, Matt Stevens, public relations manager of Brazzers, said,
This matches an incident which occurred in 2012 with our ‘Brazzersforum,’ which was managed by a third party. The incident occurred because of a vulnerability in the said third party software, the ‘vBulletin’ software, and not Brazzers itself.
The leaked user data, released recently, was passed onto Vice’s Motherboard, who’d received the same from breach monitoring site Vigilante.pw for verification purposes. The dataset has a total of over 928,072 individual entries, but many of those are duplicates or inactive(seems many people left with the fear of being discovered!?). It is speculated to contain 790,724 unique email addresses, alongwith usernames and plaintext passwords for each user.
Brazzers was, however, quick on its toes and shut down the forum, as soon as the news of the user data availability hit the interwebs. It has since then been taken down for maintenance, and hasn’t gone live since then. The company might currently be working on sending out password reset(and two-factor authentication) requests to its behemoth userbase.
Brazzers takes the privacy and safety of its users very seriously. 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. We banned all non-active accounts in that list in case those usernames and passwords are re-used in the future.
said Matt Steven from Brazzers.
Though the company has already taken stringent measures to protect their platform, this still spells bad news for the users whose data is out floating on the Dark Web. Other notorious hackers can supposedly use this data to threaten the users for monetary benefits(as seen in the Ashley Madison breach)/
But you don’t need to be scared or go into complete hiding. You can check if you’re login credentials are included in the data leaked by visiting Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned? And if you’re one of those unlucky people, then you’re advised to reset the login credentials where you might have used the same combo. You are also advised to enable two-factor authentication to better protect your privacy and personal data from unwanted intrusion.
