According to a report from Cybernews, the popular adult site BangBros has reportedly compromised sensitive user and model data.
In a discovery made in June, Cybernews researchers unearthed over eight gigabytes of confidential data related to BangBros users. This trove of information included details such as IP addresses, usernames, messages exchanged between users, their respective nations, geolocations, along with personal attributes of models like their names, ages, and bios.
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Mantas Kasiliauskis, an information security researcher at Cybernews stated that “While there was no direct leak of login credentials, hackers can potentially correlate the IP addresses with identities obtained through other data breaches.”
The leaked information was found stored in an unsecured Elasticsearch instance—a system designed for managing extensive databases. Notably, one of the leak files encompassed nearly 11 million distinct entries. Researchers from Cybernews believe this misconfiguration may have occurred accidentally.
Upon recognizing the issue with BangBros’s data storage practices, Cybernews informed them about the vulnerability which has since been rectified. Despite this positive action taken by BangBros to shore up their defenses against future breaches, experts warn that user safety remains at stake if malicious parties accessed this sensitive information during the exposure period.
Kasiliauskis further elaborated on potential ramifications: “If malicious entities acquired this dataset successfully, they could trace and tie viewer habits related to adult content back to specific individuals. When combined with additional private data points—this scenario raises severe privacy concerns which could lead to personal embarrassment or social stigmatization in more conservative regions.”
Representatives from Mashable have reached out for comments from BangBros and will provide updates should any responses be forthcoming.
