Everyone would like to believe that the porn they watch is a private matter, but a hacker group just proved that even your most intimate viewing habits could become public.
The hacker collective ShinyHunters announced on Tuesday that they stole data belonging to premium customers of adult film website Pornhub and have threatened to publish the private information, Reuters reports.
ShinyHunters sent extortion demands to Pornhub — which boasts more than 100 million daily visits and 36 billion visits per year — claiming that they stole 94GB of data containing over 200 million records of personal information from premium members, the website BleepingComputer first reported.
“We’re demanding a ransom payment in Bitcoin to prevent the publication of [Pornhub] data and delete the data,” ShinyHunters told Reuters.
Between this and the risk that your smart sex toy can be hacked, it’s getting harder and harder to keep your sex life private, even if you never leave the comfort of your own home.
The data breach didn’t come directly from Pornhub, but instead, ShinyHunters hacked into Mixpanel, a company that provided data analytics to Pornhub until 2021.
“It is important to note this was not a breach of Pornhub Premium’s systems. Passwords, payment details and financial information remain secure and were not exposed,” the adult film website wrote in a security announcement.
The scope of the data breach is not yet known, but Reuters independently verified that at least some of the hacker group’s claims are true. ShinyHunters shared data of 14 users of Pornhub’s premium services, and the publication was able to match the details of six of those people with information that had been dumped online in a previous data breach.
