In a massive data breach, it has been officially confirmed by Pornhub that hackers have stolen the data related to searches and viewing of premium users. Pornhub said, ‘The incident occurred within our analytics vendor Mixpanel’s environment and involved a limited set of analytics events for some users.’ And this Mixpanel breach also previously affected OpenAI.
The notification on Pornhub says, ‘affected only select Premium users,’ and ‘was not a breach of Pornhub Premium systems.’ The platform is currently conducting an internal investigation to help ‘determine the nature and scope of the reported incident.’
According to a report by Bleeping Computer, the hacking group Shinyhunters started extorting multiple Mixpanel customers last week, saying via email that it would publish the stolen data unless a ransom was paid. Reports suggest that ShinyHunters told Pornhub that the hacking group has access to 94GB of data of the viewing habits of Premium users, which consists of more than 200 million records of personal info.
To confirm the same, ShinyHunters also shared a small chunk of data with Bleeping Computer, which comprises email addresses, video watches, locations, and keywords associated with the videos. The data also showed when the video was watched and whether it was downloaded or not.
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On the other hand, Mixpanel has denied all the allegations by saying, ‘The data was last accessed by a legitimate employee account at Pornhub’s parent company in 2023. If this data is in the hands of an unauthorized party, we do not believe that is the result of a security incident at Mixpanel.’
Until now, Pornhub has not made any official statement on the reports of extortion. However, an advisory has been shared with the users to be more mindful of the mails the receive or any links in them.
