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Grumble-flick chat site exposes flirts' privates
Oh, put it away - no, too late
The email addresses and passwords of more than a million users of the YouPorn sex chat site were exposed to all and sundry this week following a coding error that went undetected for years.
The data - which identifies customers of the smut site, exposing them to potential embarrassment as a result - might also be used in attempts to hack into more sensitive accounts maintained by the same potential victims. Those that use the same or similar passwords for more sensitive accounts (webmail, Facebook, PayPal etc) are most at risk of attack.
Grumble-flick vault YouPorn - unlike porn portal Brazzers, the victim of a similar recent attack that also exposed customers data - wasn't hacked. Instead careless programmers left unencrypted sign-up information on a public-facing web server.
The sensitive files were uploaded to an FTP site and released as a (no longer available) torrent. However the index, and some older files, from the YouPorn chat site are still available through archive.org.
The breach became public knowledge this week via a thread on Flashback.org, Sweden’s largest web forum, which includes samples of some of the harvested files.
"Looking at the data, it seems like a careless programmer accidentally left debug logging on to a publicly accessible URL as early as November 2007, and it has been storing all registrations ever since," explains Anders Nilsson of CTO at Swedish security distributor EuroSecure, in a blog post on the breach.
"The data was found by someone sweeping websites for publicly accessible, but non-linked ('hidden') folders, looking for either porn or sensitive material like this, and struck gold," he adds.
The affected site - chat.youporn.com - was taken down on Tuesday, 21 February. Prior to this, the site offered "regular" chat with different rooms and moderators, and the possibility of sending audio or video to other members of the forum.
The main YouPorn.com site appears to be operating as normal. ®