Users of Guardian Soulmates Spammed Following Information Leak

Visitors to the Guardian Soulmates dating site whose operator is The Guardian were recently getting spammed with electronic mails, sexually explicit following inadvertent leakage of their contact information.

A few spam recipients described the e-mails "creepy" since they contained personal info picked from their accounts on the dating site. A particular visitor intimated to BBC that the website was modified during November.

The Guardian apparently has held an intermediate technology provider responsible. Telling BBC News, that visitor lamented that it was the information which he felt happy posting on the Internet at a particular time, however, when it was utilized in an irrelevant manner as within the spam messages, it indeed gave creepy feelings. Mirror.co.uk posted this, May 8, 2017.

Evidently, people got to know the problem when a person from the public got in touch with BBC only to know that the junk messages were getting dispatched solely to e-mail ids that reached Guardian Soulmates. The messages had the username, e-mail id along with more information which was definitely taken from databases of Guardian Soulmates.

Nefarious actors lifted the data and utilized it for crafting e-mails that were based on info about victims, like physical descriptions and relationship preferences. According to Senior Security Researcher Marco Cova from Lastline, the incident serves as one good reminder about each hack that exposes data which miscreants utilize for launching more assaults.

Cova continues that each hack serves to remind that strong authentication means are important for professional and personal computers, web apps and networks. When enterprise assets' use is blurred professionally and privately, particularly laptops, it underlines how critical it's to safeguard companies from their core network to exit points.

Earlier incidences about dating websites getting breached like Beautiful People and Ashley Madison have resulted in likewise info getting traded on the underground forums as also the gray web, alternatively simply put up online. The Guardian has said that impacted end-users who pay a maximum of 32 pounds/month for using the dating site need know that an intermediate technology provider caused the leakage, while a few e-mail ids and usernames were exposed, letting spammers reach and exploit them.

» SPAMfighter News - 5/11/2017