In 2015, Ashley Madison, a dating site that encouraged users to have an affair, was hacked, exposing names, and postal and email addresses. A year later, dating site AdultFriendFinder was hacked, exposing more than 400 million user accounts. Users who want to keep their dating preferences a secret could experience blackmail as a result of data leaks. Scammers are aware that they could reveal private information and damage a user’s reputation, potentially costing them their relationships or financial security. Some individuals may be using dating apps while in a relationship or married — a scammer could use information from leaked conversations to threaten to expose users to their families.
The hacker posted a 1.2 GB file on a hacking forum containing information from MeetMindful’s database. The content of this file includes a wealth of information that users provided when they set up profiles on the MeetMindful site and mobile apps. To show they meant business, they posted sample files containing some of the stolen data, which included company financial information detailing employee salaries and documents mapping the company’s internal network. Dating apps always carry privacy risks, but make sure to take precautions when choosing to use a platform. Always take into account a company’s track record with user privacy and data. Keep private communications within the dating app’s chat client for as long as possible, since they don’t require you to share a phone number like other chat apps.
Needless to say, the security issue is particularly concerning to Bumble’s user base, especially those who’ve aligned their settings so as to hide their profiles from those who do not meet their interest criteria, the case relays. The suit posits that a tech-savvy Bumble user could exploit the app’s vulnerabilities just as the security researcher did and gain access to profiles that otherwise would have been hidden. Further, the case takes issue with Bumble’s photo verification tool, which the suit says relies on artificial intelligence to ensure that users are the same people as those being displayed in their profile pictures.
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As the Wall Street Journal noted in a May 2015 brief titled “Risky Business for AshleyMadison.com,” the company had voicedplans for an initial public offeringin London later this year with the hope of raising as much as $200 million. As if to support this theory, the message left behind by the attackers gives something of a shout out to ALM’s director of security. Reached by KrebsOnSecurity late Sunday evening, ALM Chief Executive Noel Biderman confirmed the hack, and said the company was “working diligently and feverishly” to take down ALM’s intellectual property.
While the Manhunt notice acknowledged that more than 7700 Washington state residents were affected by the breach, the company didn’t mention what percentage of its users had their data stolen. There are a growing number of cybercriminals who create dating profiles pretending to be someone they’re not. They meet someone online, create a relationship with them, and eventually gain their trust. Data belongs to dating site MeetMindful and includes everything from real names to Facebook account tokens, and from email addresses and geo-location information.
You blew it, Ashley Madison: Dating site slammed for security ‘shortcomings’
Online dating service Zoosk and its parent co. face a class action over a May 2020 data breach that supposedly compromised the information of more than 30 million users. The ShinyHunters hacking group has stolen and published the personally identifiable data of MeetMindful users, according to a report from ZDNet. The data has been made available as a free download on a “publicly accessible hacking forum known for its trade in hacked databases,” according to a security researcher speaking anonymously to the outlet. Again, use caution regarding who you trust and what personal data you share on dating apps. There’s nothing a user can do to prevent data breaches on the platform’s side. However, you can take some precautions to protect your privacy while using online dating.
Despite the security breach, the service reportedly still had some 52 million members as of 2017 – while as recently as last year, some users have been threatened by hackers that their personal information was shared. Following the hack, communities of internet vigilantes began combing through to find famous individuals, whom they planned to publicly humiliate. France24 reported that 1,200 Saudi Arabian ‘.sa’ email addresses were in the leaked database, which were further extortionable due to the fact that adultery is punishable via death in Saudi Arabia. Several thousand U.S. .mil and .gov email addresses were registered on the site. In the days following the breach, extortionists began targeting people whose details were included in the leak, attempting to scam over US$200 worth of Bitcoins from them. In other cases, poor security — in some cases none at all — led to data spills involving some of the most sensitive data.
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The contact form sends information by non-encrypted email, which is not secure. Submitting a contact form, sending a text message, making a phone call, or leaving a voicemail does not create an attorney-client relationship. Unfortunately and unintentionally, IndonesianCupid the inactive user problem was supposedly caused by a software bug and the developers team is working on the issue. Whether this is a concealment of fraud and a plausible enough explanation will yet be seen and examined by the courts.
On its face, a compromised LinkedIn account — where people rarely store more than their résumé — would not appear to have broad consequences. The number of users on online dating apps and sites continues to increase. Approximately 7 million user accounts were hacked and exposed from LifeBoat.
The company said it doesn’t yet know the full scope of the breach, but it promised to «work vigilantly,» noting that FriendFinder Networks «fully appreciates the seriousness of the issue.» Millions of others remain unnamed for now, but anyone can open the files — which remain freely available online. Already, some of the adult website’s customers are being identified by name. “If this breach was indeed made possible by such a fundamental flaw, it would suggest security may not have been a top priority at the company,” he said. The company said about 53,000 passport numbers were also stolen in the attack. About 3.2 million of the driver’s licence numbers that were stolen were provided over the past 10 years.
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«Dating sites are designed by default to share a ton of information about you; however, there’s a limit to what should be shared,» says David Kennedy, CEO of the threat tracking firm Binary Defense Systems. «And often times these dating sites provide little to no security, as we have seen with breaches going back several years from these sites.» On 24 August 2015, Toronto police announced that two unconfirmed suicides had been linked to the data breach, in addition to «reports of hate crimes connected to the hack.» Unconfirmed reports say a man in the U.S. died by suicide. At least one suicide, which was previously linked to Ashley Madison, has since been reported as being due to «stress entirely related to issues at work that had no connection to the data leak». A variety of security researchers and internet privacy activists debated the media ethics of journalists reporting on the specifics of the data, such as the names of users revealed to be members.