Porn site leaks millions of email addresses and passwords

 

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 22 Feb 2012 at 16:41

A porn site has leaked emails and passwords of a million users due to careless coding.

The list contains email addresses and passwords of registered YouPorn users, but no other personal details. While most of the data has been taken offline, some of it was copied to PasteBin.

"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," noted Anders Nilsson from Swedish security firm Eurosecure in a blog post.

For a security professional it is baffling how coders working on a website with such sensitive content can make mistakes of this magnitude

"For a security professional it is baffling how coders working on a website with such sensitive content can make mistakes of this magnitude," he said.

Both Nilsson and Sophos technology consultant Graham Cluley noted the breach could not only cause red faces, but wider security breaches.

"More than the embarrassment factor, there's also a security issue here," Cluley said in a Sophos blog post. "We know that many internet users adopt the same password for multiple sites. So, if your YouPorn password is now known, hackers might try that same password against your email address, your PayPal account, your Amazon account, and all many of other online resources."