Pornhub users under threat as hackers demand ransom over leaked data

Hacking aggroup ShinyHunters has claimed responsibleness for stealing Pornhub information that belonged to the website’s insurance premium customers. The aggroup is also threatening to publish the data if its ransom demands are not met.

The data pertaining to Pornhub’s paying customers was reportedly stolen during a recent Mixpanel data breach, as per a report by BleepingComputer.

Meanwhile, the extortion gang also sent a sample of the data to Reuters, which the news agency has partially confirmed to be authentic.

“We’re demanding a ransom payment in Bitcoin to prevent the publication of [Pornhub] data and delete the data,” ShinyHunters told Reuters.

Mixpanel, however, denied the claims by ShinyHunters that the Pornhub data leak was due to an issue at its end. The company told Reuters, “We are confident Pornhub was not among those clients and that this data is unrelated to the November incident.”

Pornhub boasts over 100 million daily visitors and around 36 billion yearly visits across its websites, making it one of the most popular platforms for adult content on the internet.

What data do hackers have?

As per the BleepingComputer report, ShinyHunters has begun extorting Mixpanel customers since last week by sending them emails that begin with “We are ShinyHunters,” warning that the stolen data would be published if ransom demands were not met.

ShinyHunters has claimed to have stolen 94GB of data containing over 200 million records of personal information. The group confirmed to BleepingComputer that the data consists of 201,211,943 records of historical search, watch, and download activity of Pornhub Premium users.

Pornhub on data leak:

Pornhub confirmed in a security post that data from a third-party analytics company had led to a “cybersecurity incident” involving its premium subscribers.

The company said, “A recent cybersecurity incident involving data from a third-party data analytics service provider has impacted some Pornhub Premium users. Specifically, this situation affects only select Premium users. It is important to note this was not a breach of Pornhub Premium’s systems.”

“No passwords, credentials, payment details, or government IDs were compromised or exposed, and we have since secured the affected account and stopped the unauthorized access,” Pornhub added.

The company also said that after becoming aware of the incident, it launched an internal investigation and “engaged with relevant authorities and with Mixpanel.” Pornhub said it is “working diligently to determine the nature and scope of the reported incident.”

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