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Adult Dating Site Hack Reveals Users' Sexual Preference, Extramarital Affairs

Posted by Soulskill on from the another-day,-another-breach dept.

An anonymous reader notes this report from Channel 4 News that Adult FriendFinder, one of the largest dating sites in the world, has suffered a database breach that revealed personal information for 3.9 million of its users. The leaked data includes email addresses, IP addresses, birth dates, postal codes, sexual preferences, and information indicating which of them are seeking extramarital affairs. There even seems to be data from accounts that were supposedly deleted. Channel 4 saw evidence that there were plans for a spam campaign against these users, and others are worried that a blackmail campaign will follow. "Where you've got names, dates of birth, ZIP codes, then that provides an opportunity to actually target specific individuals whether they be in government or healthcare for example, so you can profile that person and send more targeted blackmail-type emails," said cybercrime specialist Charlie McMurdy.

5 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Hopefully by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hopefully some of the users that will be approached will not be good candidates for blackmailing; because they already got out of the relationship they were trying to cheat on or have already come out of the closet with whatever sexual kink they have.

    Hopefully those users will contact police when they receive blackmail attempts and will aid in netting whoever is behind this

  2. Re:How could you protect against this? by 3.5+stripes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why do you assume the hackers got everything, instead of just pulling a little jimmy droptables, hell all they really needed to get that info is read only access and a select all statement..

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  3. Re: Some visualization by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Oh god yes this please. Fuck all the blackmail stories; there's a sociologic goldmine in this data. Dissertations will be written on this for years to come.

  4. Re:This is why adultery is wrong by O('_')O_Bush · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Either that or be open about it. It is hard to blackmail someone over something that is public knowledge.

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    while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
  5. Look up your email address by OzPeter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In the Ars story about this they pointed out a website that tracks beaches that I hadn't heard of before: ';--have i been pwned?

    I plugged my email addresses into this and found out that I had been a part of the Adobe breach fro October 2013. And I don't remember Adobe telling me about it

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