Users of the xHamster website may have to spend a few days on PornHub. The popular pornographic content site has suffered a massive theft of email accounts (and passwords, especially those that are easy to crack) of approximately 380,000 users . Among which are some forty accounts belonging to members of the United States Army and another thirty to members of different governments, including those of the United States itself and the United Kingdom.
So far, the information regarding when said leak has occurred has not been disclosed. Since stealing a database of such a size requires extensive and long-term access. Some rumors claim that an anonymous hacker found a vulnerability earlier this year and has been stealing this massive amount of information from the website's servers ever since.
A company spokesperson, meanwhile, denies that xHamster is not a safe site for the privacy of its users. “The passwords of all registered xHamster users are properly encrypted, making them virtually impossible to hack. So all passwords are secure, as well as user data, ” said the spokesperson for the porn content website.
According to LeakBase , a company specializing in locating these types of gaps, xHamster employs a “trivial and easy to hack system. The fact that they think their algorithms are secure is a glaring example of what companies skimp on computer security today . "
It is not the first time that the online pornography industry has seen a vulnerability of this type expose its flaws in the system as well as a theft of its database. American porn giant Brazzers suffered a gigantic breach in 2012 whereby approximately 800,000 user accounts were compromised.
For now, if you want to continue using the xHamster web service, it is recommended to do so with your account closed. And under no circumstances access your account and update the password until the security breach is solved by the website.
The Ashley Madison case
Both in the case of pornography websites and in
