If you’re lucky enough to have never heard of the FriendFinder network, you must live a blissfully sheltered existence. Plenty of single, attached, married, and “it’s complicated”-type users maintain AdultFriendFinder accounts for the “world’s largest sex and swinger community.” Mind you, a lot of these people aren’t using their accounts successfully, for they largely sign on for hookups and end up chatting in vain with bots.
Still, folks surf their accounts on a regular basis. Even more people probably had active accounts at one time and let them lapse, but if they were “free” users, then they may have never deleted them. And millions of these people — over 300 million of them — were exposed in an October hacking, according to ZDNet and Leaked Source.
But that’s not all. The FriendFinder Network owns several other sites that were also breached for a total of 412 million affected users. 60 million other accounts from the associated Cams.com site were breached. And with the addition of Penthouse, Stripshow, and iCams to the mix, yeah, there’s gonna be a whole lot of upset spouses out there, but maybe they have accounts too. ZDNet secured a statement from the company:
“Over the past several weeks, FriendFinder has received a number of reports regarding potential security vulnerabilities from a variety of sources. While a number of these claims proved to be false extortion attempts, we did identify and fix a vulnerability that was related to the ability to access source code through an injection vulnerability.”
For perspective, the 2015 Ashley Madison hack affected 37 million users. Also in 2015, a similar FriendFinder breach only resulted in 4 million users enduring public humiliation for a different hack. And to make matters even worse, not even people who deleted their accounts for this latest hack were invulnerable, as 15 million deleted accounts also remained in the mix. Still, delete your accounts, people. Chatting with bots is no fun for anyone.
(Via CNET, ZDNet, The Verge & Leaked Source)