Another big data breach was uncovered. This time 800,000 user records leaked out of the Brazzers website. The attack was aimed at the site’s forum, but even users who didn’t use the forums and just registered on the site had their data leaked.
Details of the Brazzers Hack
Brazzers is one of the biggest pornographic sites one the Internet (for those of you pretending not to know.) The hack was reported by Motherboard. They were provided with a copy of the of the data dump by Vigilante.pw. The leaked data contained:
- Emails addresses
- Usernames
- Plain text passwords
Why would Brazzer customers who never used the forum still get leaked? It’s because of the way the site is set up. Information from the standard account was included in the forum database. It was done for “user convenience” As of now, the forum is closed, and displays the “Brazzers is currently under construction” message. The exact number of the stolen record is 928,072, but a lot of them are duplicates or non-functioning accounts. Still, a lot of personal information was compromised.
2012 and Hackings
2012 isn’t just the year that the world was supposed to end again. A lot of the leaked data comes from hackings that were conducted in 2012, Dropbox, Last.FM, and Yahoo . You may think that 2012 was a long time ago, and that the information stolen by the hackers wouldn’t be that useful, but people rarely change their emails, and some of them don’t even bother changing their passwords. After all, if you’ve given the email to a workplace, or you’re using it for an important accounts, you wouldn’t just discard it. It’s understandable, but keeping the same email for a long time can have security risks. As we’ve seen by the massive amount of hacks in 2012, millions of users get their data stolen.
The Extra Sensitive Information
The Brazzers Forum hack can be a bit more embarrassing for the affected users. Pornography is still kind of taboo in regular society, even though it’s very widely viewed (and enjoyed.) People who posted especially spicy comments on the forums can get quite embarrassed if their identity becomes known.
Publically available information from the web can be easily used for nefarious purposes. What would be posted on the Brazzers forum if not comments about porn, which can contain pretty private information like sexual preferences, fetishes, and other stuff people posted? The situation could be somewhat similar to the Ashley Madison hack where emails, passwords, and usernames leaked along with very personal information like sexual preferences, kinks, etc.
This year was full of leaks and massive data breaches dating back to 2012. Time will tell if 2012 year holds more hacking secrets. Right now, it seems likely. If you haven’t changed your passwords in a long time, it’s a good idea to do so, even if your profile hasn’t been hacked yet. We don’t know the most commonly used password for the Brazzers accounts, but we’re willing to bet that the usual suspects – “123456789“, “qwerty“, and “password” would make an appearance on the list.
