Approximately 1.1 Million people suffer data hacks from the dating website BeautifulPeople.
The big news was broken on Twitter where Troy Hunt who is the operator of the HaveIBeenPwned.com made a public announcement stating that due to the insecure MangoDB test server left unguardedly open, without an admin password, millions of clients’ data was leaked and exposed on the Dark Web where their personal details are being traded. The details of the leaked customer accounts have been on display on Hunt’s service website, all those registered with BeautifulPeople.com can check out the Hunt’s service and search for their email address and find out if their details are lying there after the big leak.
New *sensitive* breach loaded: Beautiful People had 1.1M accounts exposed. 25% were already in @haveibeenpwned: https://t.co/hv1u9SEsMR
— Have I been pwned? (@haveibeenpwned) April 25, 2016
However, Beautiful People tried to explain but their explanation does not hold weight. As Hunt also threw some light on the issue that he suspects some hacker found the database, downloaded it and put it up for sale on some secretive data trading forum. The stolen data was later sent by some cryptic hacker to Hunt who confirmed its legitimacy assisted by a Forbes reporter. BeautifulPeople hacked database also allegedly featured over 15 million of private messages BOY THAT’S SOME HACK!
Another scandal is already in the air as Forbes staff writer, claims to have known about the insecure, unsafe database since last December, he allegedly was informed by MacKeeper’s security researcher Chris Vickery. The two contacted BeautifulPeople, who told them the database they had discovered, was only a test server and that no actual user information was exposed. According to latest reports, the Company has taken down its server the infamous no password MongoDB database.
Both the parties claim that their database contains real-time information like names, email addresses, encoded passwords, geo-location information, and more than 100 personal data traits featuring sexual preferences, hobbies, drinking habits, favorite movies, and plenty of other data characteristics that are a signature for these dating websites.
The BeautifulPeople has been notorious online off late since it was much publicized rather criticized for being judgmental as they only have “beautiful people” who are chosen after a lengthy survey and only selected on the basis of their attractiveness. In an infamous incident in 2009, it was revealed that BeautifulPeople rejected around 1.8 million people from their website due to loss of hair, age and weight gain, website operators also frequently removed the “not-so-attractive folks, this did not go down well with public.
Chris Vickery, who had an important role in scanning this data was also responsible for discovering voting data of 3.4 million Mexican citizens,13 million credentials of MacKeeper users and 3.3 million accounts of Hello Kitty users. However, this is not the first time when a dating site had its entire data leaked online. Last year, Ashley Madison had its server breached and 37 Million users had their personal information leaked.
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