PlentyofFish Hacked, Founder Emails Hacker's Mom

hellkyng writes "The online dating site PlentyofFish was hacked, and purportedly 30 million customer records were stolen. The site's founder, Markus Frind, is blaming the security researcher who discovered the vulnerability and the journalist who confirmed the issue." The researcher who reported the vulnerability is Chris Russo, one of the guys who hacked The Pirate Bay last year. He explained his side of the story as well. Mr. Frind says he tracked down Russo's Facebook page and emailed his mom.

Comments

should not affect slashdot crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

should not affect slashdot crowd since they do not date.

Re:should not affect slashdot crowd

[Lord Ender]

On the contrary, I recently experimented with online dating myself. In my experience, the site should actually be called "plenty of whales" though...

Re:makes sense

[SIR_Taco]

What's worse, after his Mom reads the e-mail, she'll probably kick him out of the basement!

Password in plaintext email

[RobertB-DC]

I was on the site for a while. It was always slightly clunky, but I'd prefer a free, one-man labor of love to a buy-in site that basically tries to promise sex for money. It was particularly helpful in helping me discover that I wasn't as bad as most of the creeps out there... and conversely, creepiness doesn't belong exclusively to those of the male persuasion. That was good to know -- it helped me realize that I need to be picky. (And my pickiness was rewarded many times over when I found my fiancee. In my Sunday School class).

But on the tech side, it irritated the living crap outta me that POF would send me a weekly e-mail with my password IN PLAIN TEXT. Every week, just as a reminder of how easy it would be to log in. Yeah, easy for *anyone* to log in as me and, if I were foolish enough to put important information on POF, to mess with my life. And, of course, if I were foolish enough to use that password for my bank account... well, I think anyone on this site knows the rest.

So I'm not at all surprised that someone found a way to hack POF. Sending a password in plaintext is bad, but not uncommon. Heck, T-Mobile does it. But sending it every week, unsolicited? I'm sorry to be rude, but that's just stupid.

Re:Password in plaintext email

[Anonymous Coward]

And my pickiness was rewarded many times over when I found my fiancee. In my Sunday School class.

Please confirm that you weren't the teacher, and she's not a student in this class...

Re:Password in plaintext email

[Whalou]

[...]I'd prefer a free, one-man labor of love[...]

So you don't date? :-P

Re:makes sense

[pawntokingspawn]

and cancel his Warcraft subscription

Re:Hyphens

[arth1]

Ask the good people at penisland, expertsexchange and powergenitalia that :)

That *was* the traditional penalty

[billstewart]

Back when Cheswick and Bellovin were doing the original Bell Labs firewalls, and caught a Dutch teenager trying to hack into their site, the Netherlands didn't have any computer security laws that made it illegal. "So we called his mom...."