The adult entertainment platform Pornhub has been victim of a huge data breach, the hackers even going as far as claiming they have access to the viewing habits and search histories of millions of its Premium subscribers. The ShinyHunters hacker group has reportedly leaked the email addresses, video search data, viewing activity, keywords, and timestamps of 200 million Pornhub users’ records, which might reveal extremely private behavioral information.
What Happened To Pornhub?
The case of the breach was not connected to Pornhub itself but to the third party analytics provider, Mixpanel, who was taking care of the data analytics systems of Pornhub and had even included historical data of analytics sent by Pornhub before 2021. Pornhub, in its argument, said that the breach only ‘select Premium users’ and that passwords, payment details or financial information were not taken.
Is It Safe To Watch Porn On Pornhub?
Meanwhile, the investigation is still on going, but the users who have been affected are already warned and told to be alert for any strange communications as well as the possible use of their personal data. There are reports that ShinyHunters has started an extortion campaign, demanding ransom in cryptocurrency to keep the stolen data from publication. Digital security analysts have shared examples of the likely dataset that entails conducting a video, searching, and the geographic location data along with the video titles. This might lead to blackmail or other types of malicious mixing if released. As far as Pornhub is concerned, it asserts that it cut off its association with Mixpanel back in 2021 and that the data is obsolete. Noteworthy, nevertheless, that security experts have raised the alarm over the large number of exposed users’ records about 94 GB of analytics data laimed by the hackers that might turn this incident into the most privacy impactful one for adult site users.
Pornhub Data Breach
The episode indicates that there is an increasing worry of third party risks’ exposure in digital data ecosystems, primarily if very personal user behaviour data is at stake. To the cybersecurity analysts’ surprise, the breach was a result of an SMS phishing (‘smishing’) attack on Mixpanel, which gave the hackers access to the analytics provider’s systems and allowed them to take the user activity data stored there. Pornhub claims that while its core infrastructure was not attacked, the ripple effect illustrates how even minor partners can turn into soft spots in the security of the data.
