Adult FriendFinder Hack Causes Risk for 412 Million Accounts

Some huge data breaches happened in the past few years, but this latest one is above all of them. LeakedSource informs that more than 412 million Friend Finder Network accounts are exposed by a hack targeting it, out of which majority (339 million) belongs to AdultFriendFinder, the site of sex hookup. Cams.com users (62 million), 7 million users of Penthouse, and a few smaller sites also got affected. This reportedly stands for significant data of around 20 years, and eclipses 360 million records from MySpace breach.

Although the hack did not consist of sensitive personal credentials like data for sexual preference, it does contain the IP addresses, email addresses, and passwords - which are sufficient to help in identifying the users in actual world. To make the situation worse, few of the passwords are stored in basic text - which is one of crucial sins of the security and is also a major reason why one should not use same passwords for different online services.

This is not the end, as FriendFinder Network also owns various other sites which also got breached, thus leading to 412 million total affected users. Also 60 million various other accounts of associated Cams.com site are breached. Uproxx.com posted on November 13th, 2016, stating that with the Penthouse iCams addition to this mix, there is going to be many upset spouses; however they might have accounts also.

Diana Ballou, Senior Counsel and Vice President of FriendFinder, told ZDNet that during the last few weeks, several reports are received by FriendFinder about possible security vulnerabilities from different sources. Diana further added that, "while a number of these claims proved to be false extortion attempts, we did identify and fix a vulnerability that was related to the ability to access source code through injection vulnerability."

It merely takes 2 minutes for creating a new email address of Gmail to use at the time of registering for online service of sensitive nature. It is easy to create the filtering rule for sending emails from the site to your main inbox, which makes it possible for you to receive messages from the people who wish to know you little better.

Besides, you can also check that whether the email service used by you allows you to create the aliases - basically false email addresses that automatically forward to your main email address.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/18/2016