Lenience Resulted in Hacking of Porn Portal

On December 26, 2007, a New Jersey company, which assists thousands of porn websites in their operation, accepted a major security breach. The incident has sparked widespread anxiety in adult-entertainment industry that the personal information of customers could be at risk.

New Jersey-based Too Much Media had acknowledged that personal data of hundreds of thousands of its customers could have been pilfered.

According to the industry chat boards, the infringement, so far, seems to be confined to e-mail addresses only. The avalanche of spam e-mails has been hitting customers' inboxes - including those addresses which were specifically created to join porn sites.

John Albright, owner of the Too Much Media Corp, said in a statement that the October incidents had not affected credit card information of the customers, as reported by Daily News on December 26, 2007.

Albright alleged that a probe is going on to find the cause and intensity of the security violation. Though the incident took place in October but the company still was not able to find out the causes, as published by the INQUIRER on December 28, 2007,

On the other hand, Visa and MasterCard said that they are unaware about the incident.

The hack had been founded by OC-3, a web-hosting outfit. More than 40% of adult sites are hosted by it.

The online adult entertainment industry has been shocked by the incident. Online porn sites are depended on anonymity between customer and service provider. This incident has created grave concerns about the security of private information of consumers.

According to the Daily News, people are scared that there could be recursion against such websites as they would be identified.

Kathee Brewer, Former Editor of AVN Online, the trade journal of the digital adult-entertainment industry, said that the adult industry has been working for long to attain a level where it becomes a trusted industry for personal information, as reported by Daily News on December 27, 2007.

Brewer also said that leakage of customer information, though it consist only e-mail addresses, has a grave effect on the industry. Consumers start to recede because they don't trust the industry now.

Related article: Long URLs Cause Security Flaw in Opera Browser

» SPAMfighter News - 1/11/2008