Less than a year after the Ashley Madison debacle, another dating site has been subject to a hack with the personal details of 1.1 million users leaked on the internet.
The data from elite dating website BeautifulPeople.com includes private information such as sexual orientation, relationship status, income and address, as well as 15 million private messages sent between users. Other information being sold online includes weight, height, job, education, body type, eye and hair colour, email address and mobile phone number.
The stolen databasealso contained users' passwords, although this information was encrypted.
According toForbes, the leak was first revealed to the website in December 2015 by a security researcher Chris Vickery. At this point, BeautifulPeople.com said the information was from a test server and the security hole was quickly closed. However, it has now come to light that the information stolen was the personal information of the site's real users.
One person who obtained the database is Troy Hunt, an Australian security expert who runs leak website HaveIBeenPwned.com. He told Forbes he couldn't predict how much this data was being sold for or how it was being used. However, he was able to verify with BeautifulPeople.com that the user data was real personal details and they could be used to attempt to reset passwords, for example.
"We're looking at in excess of 100 individual data attributes per person," Hunt told Forbes. "Everything you'd expect from a site of this nature is in there."
A statement by BeautifulPeople.com said: "We can confirm we were notified of a breach on December 24th of 2015 of one of our MongoDB test servers. This was a staging server and not part of our production data base. The staging server was immediately shut down."
The company said it had told its users about the breach and confirmed passwords were encrypted and financial details were not included in the information originally leaked.
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