Porn Cam Network Admits Major Data Breach That Left Data of Thousands of Erotic Models Exposed

Adult modelling is arguably one of the world’s most security-oriented occupations these days, which begs the question why the network seemingly has not encrypted the data of the people it employs.

A data breach in a major porn cam affiliate network has exposed the personal data of more than 4,000 models worldwide.

Security researchers from vpnMentor wrote in a blog last week that PussyCash, a platform that runs content on adult websites and has about 66 million registered members, has left over 875,000 documents and files exposed on a Virginia-based Amazon server.

The leaked data is highly sensitive as it includes photographs and scans of passports, national ID cards, driver’s licences, credit cards, SSNs, marriage and birth certificates, handwritten bios and model release forms.

Those contain full legal names, signatures, dates of birth, addresses and phone numbers, exposing the models to the risk of identity theft and putting their privacy in jeopardy.

The oldest documents in the stash were reportedly filed 20 years ago, with the newest ones being just a few weeks old. The data breach affected models from at least 27 countries, including the US, the UK, China and Russia.

VpnMentor experts said they found the breach through port scanning, a technique employed both by security technicians and hackers to probe servers for vulnerabilities. They said that they were able to access all files hosted on the database because it was “completely unsecured and unencrypted”.

They added in the blog that PussyCash had not replied to their questions relating to the leak; however, the platform got back to the BBC, saying it had “acted promptly and removed public access to the open folder as soon as vpnMentor alerted us to this fact.”

This is the latest in a string of headlines about the perils of doing porn in the digital era. Just two weeks ago, a US judge ruled that the San Diego-based adult site GirldDoPorn owed nearly $13 million to several models whose videos it sold, despite the owners’ promises, to other websites and not to private collectors.

Sourse: sputniknews.com