Personal details of 70 adult websites users exposed online

Personal details of hundreds of thousands of users on over 70 adult dating and some ecommerce websites worldwide have been exposed online security researchers said on SundayThe cybersecurity research team at vpnMentor which is worlds largest VPN review website found that the hacked websites were using the same marketing software built by email marketing company MailfireThe software in question had been compromised through an unsecured Elasticsearch server exposing people all over the world to dangers like identity theft blackmail and fraud the report mentionedUpon further investigation it turned out that some of the sites exposed in the data leak were scams set up to trick men looking for dates with women in various parts of the worldThe leaky database that stored more than 882GB of log files was taken offline on September 3 after vpnMentor researchers tracked it downEach of the millions of notifications contained valuable and sensitive Personally Identifiable Information PII data for people using the affected websites to send and receive messagesThe leaked data revealed included full names age and date of birth gender email addresses locations of senders IP addresses profile pictures uploaded by users and profile bio descriptionsAside from the PII data the leak also exposed conversations happening between users on dating sites affectedMailfire acted immediately and secured the server within a few hours Mailfire assumed full responsibility and insisted that the companies exposed were in no way responsible at all mdash and our research has also confirmed this to be true the report saidAmong the websites affected included a dating site for meeting Asian women a premium international dating site targeting an older demographic It also appeared that many of the websites shared common ownersAt the beginning of our investigation the servers database was storing 8821 GB of data from the previous four days containing over 370 million records for 66 million individual notifications sent in just 96 hours the vpnMentor research team saidThis is an absolutely massive amount of data to be stored in the open and it kept growing Tensofmillions of new records were uploaded to the server via new indices each day we were investigating itAnyone who would have found this database would have been able to learn the identities of users who signed up on these dating sites and access their profiles to read private messages or see past connections reports ZDNetKeep scrolling to read more newsCatch up on all the latest Crime National International and Hatke news here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updates MidDay is now on Telegram Click here to join our channel middayinfomedialtd and stay updated with the latest newsThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever