It was reported by vpnMentor’s research team that a data breach at the adult website Luscious exposed users’ personal details. Luscious is a niche adult website that has 1.195 million registered users and 20 million monthly visits. Those supposedly anonymous users post and comment on the website, upload videos and images of cartoon porn to the website. According to the exposed database, there were 19.7 million images, 900 videos and 30000 user blog posts.
How many people have been affected?
On Aug. 15, the data breach was discovered. According to the research team, nearly 1.2 million users of Luscious were affected. We have access to what they have uploaded. Personal data in those users’ profiles were also compromised, including username, personal email address, location, gender and user activity logs. What supposed to hide in the personal files at the website is now visible to the others.
What is the impact of this data breach?
That was a disaster for these users. Their private data may be exploited by hackers to do harm to the users or do something illegal. Users affected by this data breach must take some measures to protect themselves.
How does such data breach happen?
The vast majority of adult websites use trackers to monitor users. Most users have no idea that they are being tracked when they visit these sites.
Some of you may be wondering how this happened. You think you were safe when you were browsing these sites because the browser didn’t tell you that you’re at risk of being tracked. In fact, this only means that your browsing will not be saved by the browser to your local device, but your browsing history can still be accessed by others. This data, once saved, is harmful to you, because it can be easily accessed by others. As a result, someone else who buys this data may send adult film ads to you or even steal sensitive information and cause big financial losses.
In fact, some of these trackers are designed to track web traffic. Although not all of them will collect personal information to record the web traffic, there is no denying that there will be collected data based on users’ IP addresses. That is to say, it is not difficult for them to access your personal data even if they only gathered your IP address. What’s worse, once these adult websites get hacked, user data collected will end up in the wrong hands.
How to avoid being a victim of a data breach?
There have been many data breaches at adult sites in the past. Look at the cases of Friend Finder Network and xHamster.
In October 2016, the Friend Finder Network, an adult dating and entertainment company, experienced one of the largest hacks ever, resulting in the disclosure of more than 412 million account information. The company operates Adult FriendFinder, which claims to be the world’s largest sex and swinger community, and several other Adult services, including Penthouse.
In November 2016, more than 380,000 users’ personal details on xHamster were publicly sold on the Internet, including user names, email addresses and MD5 hashes.
All of us should draw a lesson from these data breaches. It’s an urgent task to take precautions to protect our online privacy, especially when visiting an adult website.
First, make sure that the adult sits you are going to visit is safe. Generally, a website protected by HTTPS is safer than others. You can see a green padlock in the address bar of this website. Besides, premium porn websites such as Pornhub are widely believed to be virus-free. But that’s not always the case. You can read articles like “how to tell if a website is safe” to distinguish malicious websites from good ones.
Many adult websites claim to allow users to stay anonymous on their sites. In fact, most of them keep track of users’ browsing history and record their personal information without their permission.
To fully protect your security and anonymity on the Internet, you’d better use a VPN to privately browse websites, especially adult websites. We highly recommend you install RitaVPN to your device. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone, which provides full protection for your devices. You can watch adult movies safely.
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With the increasing mobile visits to adult sites, a virtual private network is needed on mobile devices to unblock adult websites as well as stay safe when browsing. Therefore, it would be quite convenient for you to have fun on adult websites even if you are on a cross-border trip.
