Cyber-security researchers from vpnMentor claim that highly sensitive personal details about thousands of porn stars and cam performers have been exposed online by adult affiliate program PussyCash.
They told BBC News they had found an open folder on PussyCash’s Amazon web server that contained 875,000 files.
The live webcam porn network, which promotes the brand ImLive.com, Sexier.com, FetishGalaxy.com and other adult websites, claims there is no evidence anyone else had accessed the folder, and it had it removed public access as soon as it had been informed of the leak.
“Privacy and the protection of user data is a top priority and concern for us,” PussyCash said in a statement.
“For this reason, we acted promptly and removed public access to the open folder as soon as vpnMentor alerted us to this fact.”
But vpnMentor said anyone with the right link could have accessed 19.95GB of data dating back over 15 years as well as from the past few weeks, including contracts revealing more than 4,000 models’:
- full name
- address
- social-security number
- date of birth
- phone number
- height
- weight
- hips, bust and waist measurements
- piercings
- tattoos
- scars
The files also revealed scans or photographs of their:
- passport
- driving licence
- credit card
- birth certificate
And the folder also contained:
- videos
- marketing materials
- photographs
- clips and screenshots of video chats
The models were mainly from North America but also from Latin America, the Czech Republic and Hungary, vpnMentor said.
And the leak represented a potentially “severe threat” of identity theft, scams, public humiliation, blackmail, extortion, stalking, job loss, and embarrassment that could “could very well ruin” their lives.
“This is really alarming,” said David Emm, a senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab. “There’s a lot of very sensitive information involved, leaving the people affected by it open to a combination of ID theft and extortion.
“It could also leave people feeling the way you do when a burglar has forced entry to your home and you know they’ve been through intimate aspects of your life.”
PussyCash hosts affiliation programs for multiple adult sites, paying webmasters for traffic sent to the sites through banners and exit traffic. They boast 66 million registered members on their webcam chat arena, ImLive, alone. Other sites include Sexier.com, FetishGalaxy, Supermen.com, Shemale.com, CamsCreative.center, forgetvanilla.com, idesires.com, Phonemates.com, SuperTrip.com, and sex.sex, among others.
This is the latest incident where a company has failed to protect data on a server properly.
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