Pornhub hackers allegedly steal data from 200 million users

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Pornhub is notifying more than 200 million premium users about a security breach.

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The adult entertainment website, which is owned by an Ottawa-based private equity firm, said that users’ data and search history may have been stolen.

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“A recent cybersecurity incident involving Mixpanel, a third-party data analytics provider, has impacted some Pornhub Premium users,” Pornhub recently confirmed, per the U.K. Daily Mail.

Pornhub uses the third-party system to analyze site traffic. Hackers potentially exposed limited records of how some users interacted with the platform.

“Passwords, payment details and financial information remain secure and were not exposed,” Pornhub said.

Cybercriminals allegedly have email addresses, search keywords

However, in an extortion demand sent to the company, the cybercriminals alleged to have a massive data set of records that included email addresses, locations, video titles, search keywords, activity types and timestamps for more than 200 million entries, technology news outlet BleepingComputer reported.

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Premium users pay $14.99 per month to access millions of videos as well as more than 100,000 premium videos that non-paying users can’t access.

“The unauthorized party was able to use this unauthorized access to extract a limited set of analytics events for some users,” Pornhub said.

Pornhub added that it has since secured the affected accounts and stopped the unauthorized access.

The adult website said that it has not worked with Mixpanel since 2023, meaning the stolen records are from that year and earlier, BleepingComputer reported.

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Hackers reportedly demanding bitcoin to delete data

Mixpanel CEO Jen Taylor said in a statement: “We took comprehensive steps to contain and eradicate unauthorized access and secure impacted user accounts.

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“We engaged external cybersecurity partners to remediate and respond to the incident.”

Mixpanel told BleepingComputer that it couldn’t verify that the Pornhub data being circulated came from the November incident.

Cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed that it was responsible for the intrusion.

“We’re demanding a ransom payment in bitcoin to prevent the publication of (Pornhub) data and delete the data,” ShinyHunters told Reuters in an online chat.

Pornhub is owned by Ethical Capital Partners, which in 2023 acquired Pornhub’s parent company MindGeek.

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