Popular Porn Site Breach Exposed 1.2 Million "Anonymous" User Profiles

[steven36]

Researchers from vpnMentor have discovered a data breach at the popular Luscious porn site that exposed the personal profiles of 1.2 million supposedly anonymous users.

 

 

What is Luscious?

According to Noam Rotem and Ran Locar from vpnMentor's research team, who have previously found details of the security systems of major hotel chains exposed online, a breach at the niche porn site, Luscious, has been uncovered.

 

Luscious is something of a niche adult site, even by the "standards" of the online pornography industry which is highly fragmented by fetish. It is focused on images of cartoon porn, primarily of the Japanese Anime or Manga variety. Collectively known as Hentai, which means any kind of bizarre sexual desire in Japanese, this porn fetish would appear to be remarkably popular.

 

Indeed, the vpnMentor research team found that Luscious has 1.195 million registered users and 20 million monthly visits. Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch, who broke the story, reported it is "one of the most popular websites in the U.S., ranking in the top 5,000 sites in traffic, per Alexa data."

 

Those nearly 1.2 million users "anonymously" upload images and video of animated porn to the Luscious site. There were 19.7 million images, 900 videos and 30,000 user blog posts according to the exposed database.

 

This user-uploaded content model is standard in the online porn business, as is the promise of anonymity for those who do so. Of course, behind the anonymous postings, there is always some profile data.

What data was exposed by the Luscious breach?

According to vpnMentor researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, the private profiles allowed users to "upload, share, comment on, and discuss content on Luscious. All of this is understandably done while keeping their identity hidden behind usernames."

 

That anonymity was found to be compromised by the researchers, with the database containing user profiles unsecured. This meant that anyone who discovered the database could access the personal details of Luscious users without having to crack a password.

 

"The highly sensitive and private nature of Luscious’ content makes users incredibly vulnerable to a range of attacks and exploitation by malicious hackers," Rotem and Locar warned, adding that even though the database has now been secured, "it’s still possible that other hackers could have accessed it earlier and extracted the same data we viewed."

 

That data included usernames, personal email addresses, user activity log, country of residence/location and gender. "Some users’ email addresses indicated their full names," the researchers said, "increasing their vulnerability to exploitation and cybercrime."

 

Those users who did not go to any great length to disguise their identity through the use of "fake" or disposable email addresses will could be vulnerable to blackmail attempts as the activity logs revealed how many image albums they had created along with their video uploads, comments made, blog entries posted, their favorite images and videos and the accounts that they followed.

 

The blackmail "doxing" threat becomes more significant when you realize that several Luscious users had joined from their official government email accounts. The researchers found examples of such users from Australia, Brazil, Italy and Malaysia.

Has the Luscious database security hole now been closed?

The exposed database was discovered by the researchers on August 15, the Luscious site owner contacted on August 16, and action to secure the database taken on August 19.

 

TechCrunch was given exclusive access to the vpnMentor findings, and Zack Whittaker reported that efforts to contact the site owner to get the database secured were initially unsuccessful. "We emailed the owner, whose email address was found in the very first user record, to disclose the security lapse, but we did not hear back after several follow-ups," Whittaker said. The email was followed up by messages via the site's contact form, Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn and SMS text.

 

The website host was also contacted, and it was at this stage that access to the database was blocked and TechCrunch published the story. After publication, the Luscious site owner confirmed the database vulnerability. "We will be reaching out to any compromised users to warn them about the potential exposure of their private email addresses," the site owner told TechCrunch.

Are you a Luscious user?

If you are a user of the Luscious porn site, then it is recommended that you change your account details immediately. Although passwords were not found in the leaky database, you would certainly be advised to change your username and the email associated with your account. As your location may well have been revealed to the Luscious database, it is further recommended that you change this as well; either by removing it from your profile or logging in via a VPN to leave a false geographic trail.

 

This highlights a broader issue: while getting people to use unique passwords for every site or service is an uphill struggle, getting them to use unique usernames and emails is liking climbing Everest.

 

Source

[DKT27]

Quote

Luscious is something of a niche adult site, even by the "standards" of the online pornography industry which is highly fragmented by fetish. It is focused on images of cartoon porn, primarily of the Japanese Anime or Manga variety. Collectively known as Hentai, which means any kind of bizarre sexual desire in Japanese, this porn fetish would appear to be remarkably popular.

 

The author seems to be doing this.

[steven36]

1 hour ago, DKT27 said:

 

The author seems to be doing this.

Thats the only way he would be able to explain it to someone that don't know what it is , anybody my age looks at like it's stupid Japanese porn cartoons . People older than me don't what Hentai is. and he wasn't  far off from wikipedia says about it .

 

Outside of Japan, hentai (変態 or へんたい;is anime and manga pornography. In the Japanese language, however, "hentai" is not a genre of media but any type of perverse or bizarre sexual desire or act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai

 

Seems to me his source  for research was what  wikipedia wrote and not his own words. and example of what your link too is to say  its gross  or disgusting  when they talk about  it .  But that's the response your going get from most people .

 

It was the feminist that were anti kink shaming years ago.

Now they guilty  of doing it themselves so all that has changed now because they figured out it's damaging to ones health but most don't really know how to fix it .

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/bh9sd3/feminism_used_to_be_strongly_antikinkshaming_but/

 

 

In the USA fetish is widely accepted well it was not so long ago , but  were starting see it as problematic and not good for you, Back when I was growing up the all the rage was erotic movies on cable but now you see very little movies like that .  After the internet and it being everywhere and we seen what it does to people we see it as a  problem and maybe you should get help. After all they ban porn on Tumblr the site were they had the anti kink shaming blog at .  the UK government  made laws against such sites .  the religious people never liked it don't never talk about it to them ,they will kick you out of there house it's taboo . while i'm not religious many people in my family  are so its not something  that's allowed to be talked  about in my house . I think kink shaming is just another word for being Anti-porn  and  that's most  religious people  many of the state laws in the USA  are based on what they believe too .

[DKT27]

2 hours ago, steven36 said:

Thats the only way he would be able to explain it to someone that don't know what it is , anybody my age looks at like it's stupid Japanese porn cartoons . People older than me don't what Hentai is. and he wasn't  far off from wikipedia says about it .

 

Outside of Japan, hentai (変態 or へんたい;is anime and manga pornography. In the Japanese language, however, "hentai" is not a genre of media but any type of perverse or bizarre sexual desire or act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai

 

Seems to me his source  for research was what  wikipedia wrote and not his own words. and example of what your link too is to say  its gross  or disgusting  when they talk about  it .  But that's the response your going get from most people .

 

Good point there.

 

I still think it's an great form of art, if you can call it that.

 

Eitherway, we are an all age friendly site and we are probably getting too adult with all this.