'Camgirl' porn sites leaked private data of millions: Details here
In a major incident, a number of 'camgirl' porn sites have exposed the private data of millions. The leak, first reported by TechCrunch, occurred after Barcelona's VTS Media, the company owning the sites, left a back-end database containing confidential information of several sex workers and website visitors open for anybody to access. Here's all you need to know about it.
What kind of information the sites leaked?
Just recently, Condition: Black cybersecurity researchers informed TechCrunch about the Camgirl network leak. They alleged that VTS Media left a database associated with the sites without any password. It remained unprotected for weeks, allowing anyone to access months-worth of daily logs of the site activities, including log-in times of users, their usernames, IP addresses, private chat messages, viewing habits, even passwords from failed logins.
Users in Europe widely affected
According to the researchers, the exposed database ties to several Camgirl network sites, including amateur.tv, webcampornoxxx.net, and placercams.com. It compromised the information of users and sex workers in almost all parts of the world, but people in Spain and rest of Europe were hit the hardest. In fact, according to Alexa traffic rankings, amateur.tv is incredibly popular in Spain.
Now, the database has been plugged
Though VTS Media hasn't commented on the matter, it has plugged the open database for good. It remains unclear if anyone accessed the unprotected information but there's no doubt that the data in question could have easily threatened the privacy of users. Essentially, it could have given away identifiable information about consumers and sex workers, even their location in some cases.
Viewing habits could be used for black mailing people
Along with the risk of being tracked, a database leak like this also puts people's sexual preferences at risk. Basically, if a threat actor had accessed this database, they could have easily learned what people are watching and renting. Then, they could have used this information (sexual preferences of people) to blackmail them into giving money.