The technological revolution has boosted many industries all around the world, including the latest hackling activity that has reached the proportions of an industry in itself. Some experts recently claimed that 2020 will be dominated by major threats like ransomware attacks, targeting IoT (Internet of Things), phishing attacks and other cyber attack campaigns.
When a hacker stole confidential info last week and published a massive list of Telnet credentials of about 500,000 servers, home routers and IoT smart devices, another team of researchers at a cybersecurity firm found that personal information related to adult website models has also been leaked by cybercriminals.
The adult website
The website, hacked recently was PussyCash, an adult affiliate network from which the threat actors extracted all the information and released it. This site hosts affiliation programs for several adult sites, paying webmasters for traffic sent to the sites through banners and exit traffic.
PussyCash has 66 million registered members on their webcam chat arena, called ImLive. There are some other sites affiliated to PussyCash which are Sexier.com, FetishGalaxy, Supermen.com, Shemale.com, CamsCreative.center, forgetvanilla.com, idesires.com, Phonemates.com, SuperTrip.com and sex.sex.
PussyCash data breach
The researchers at cybersecurity firm vpnMentor found the breach as part of a web mapping project. The experts said in a statement that "Our researchers use port scanning to examine particular IP blocks and test open holes in systems for weaknesses."
It should be mentioned that the security company, gained access to PussyCash's S3 bucket, a Virginia-based Amazon server folder with 19.95 GB of visible data because it was unsecured and unencrypted. By using a web browser, the team could access all files hosted on the database. However, after finding out the data breach, vpnMentor alerted the company.
The experts from vpnMentor revealed that the data leak from a so-called S3 Bucket has exposed the personal data of more than 4,000 models among more than 875,000 files. In a statement, the researchers also mentioned that the leak represents "a potentially severe threat to those whose data has been exposed. It has many implications, all of which could very well ruin the lives of the models/actors involved."
The leaked data
As mentioned by the vpnMentor, the leaked data includes photographs and passport details, driver's licenses, credit cards, contract forms, social security numbers, national identification cards and handwritten bios and other sensitive details.
Take a look at the leaked documents:
However, Pussycash told Fox News that privacy and the protection of user data is their major priority and that is why when they were alerted over the data breach, the website acted promptly and removed public access to the open folder.
The targeted folder was actually formed in 2013, claimed the website and added that the stolen data in the folder included no "Information of any performers or members of any website promoted by PussyCash.com, including ImLive.com."
