Data Breach Exposes Brazzers Porn Accounts

The account details of hundreds of thousands porn account holders has been breached after the fan forum ‘Brazzersforum’ was hacked.

Brazzerforum is where fans and users of the Brazzers adult content website can meet and discuss all things related to that porn service.

It has a separate URL from the main site and is run by separate company, with hte aim to give porn fans an area to discuss different Brazzers porn scenes and stars, or request a new scenario they would like to see in future Brazzers productions.

Old Hacks?

The Brazzerforum data breach actually took place in 2013, but details have only emerged now after details of the account holders was passed for verification to Motherboard by Vigilante.pw which monitors data breaches.

It reported that the data included 790,724 unique email addresses, and also usernames and plaintext passwords, and said the complete data set had 928,072 entries in all, but many are duplicates.

“This matches an incident which occurred in 2012 with our ‘Brazzersforum,’ which was managed by a third party,” Matt Stevens, a PR manager for Brazzers, told Motherboard in a statement. “The incident occurred because of a vulnerability in the said third party software, the ‘vBulletin’ software, and not Brazzers itself.”

“That being said, users’ accounts were shared between Brazzers and the ‘Brazzersforum’ which was created for user convenience,” he added. “That resulted in a small portion of our user accounts being exposed and we took corrective measures in the days following this incident to protect our users.”

The Brazzersforum was also hit in 2012, again with the problem seemingly stemming from the forum’s use of vBulletin,which is often not maintained and therefore leaves it open to vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit.

2012 was a bad year for porn hacks. Early that year popular adult website YouPorn was hacked and one million users had their personal details exposed. Months later Digital Playground, one of the biggest porn sites in the world, was also a victim to a hack attack.

All this means that potentially the details and porn fantasies of thousands of users could be revealed to the world.

Porn Hacks

There have been a steady stream of porn hacks and data breaches over the years. Last month Symantec warned of hacked Instagram profiles which are being altered with pornographic imagery promoting adult dating and porn spam.

Perhaps the most famous porn-related data breach in recent times was that of adultery website Ashley Madison.

Ashley Madison was hacked in July 2015 and a cache of its internal data was released a month later.

That resulted in blackmailers targeting Ashley Madison users, with some users even receiving threats at their homes through the post.

Porn users and victims are especially vulnerable to blackmail because of the sensitive nature of the content. Revenge porn for example was banned in February 2015.

The Crown Prosecution Service recently reported that more than 200 people have since been prosecuted for it.

That said, the porn industry is fighting back by trying to improve its security. Earlier this year Pornhub, one of the world’s biggest adult sites, launched a bug bounty program for security researchers to identify flaws on its platform.

The scheme paid off and in July three security researchers collected more than $20,000 (£15,000) in bug bounties after they gained access to Pornhub and were able to obtain sensitive data on its users.

Are you a security pro? Try our quiz!