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DP38 Biggest Data Breaches - 5 - Friend Finder
The last company I want to talk about summarizes what I’ve been talking about in the previous parts. For this part I’ll focus on Friend Finder Networks, an adult dating and entertainment company that was part of the fifth largest data breach. In 2016, due to hacking and lack of security, 412 million accounts were exposed.
This hack also includes the 339 million accounts on AdultFriendFinder.com and 14 million accounts that were meant to be deleted but the company held the data on their databases.
Overall the data accounts for two decades worth of data from the company’s largest site. As for the information in question I’m not sure what was taken.
That being said, Friend Finder Networks had another breach the year before which exposed 4 million accounts. The data taken from that was revolving around sexual preferences and whether someone was looking for extramarital affairs or not.
As for what information could’ve been taken it can be vast. Usernames, email addresses, date of last visit, passwords, membership data, whether the user paid for items and more.
And the reason I can only give this sort of vague information is to this date, when Friend Finder was approached about this breach, they confirmed the site vulnerability but never announced the breach of information. They’ve never publicly announced what was taken.
When the reporters on the breach discussed with users about this breach, some weren’t surprised because the security was rather flimsy. To further drive that point one user signed up by putting in fake information about who they are and accessing the site with no issues.
With that in mind the quality of information the hacker was able to obtain may not have been significant, but you can see themes with this story.
This site is similar to a social media networking site riddled with scandals.
It’s collecting information that isn’t entirely entirely necessary in order to fully experience the platform or use the service.
The site has poor security measures in place and did little to bring this up to peoples attention similar to so many other companies who’ve spent months or years keeping it under wraps.
And like with all of these cases, we need to learn to best protect ourselves. Have tighter passwords, be stingy about the information we give. And if you’re really that curious about something, you can always toss out fake information.
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By dpappThe last company I want to talk about summarizes what I’ve been talking about in the previous parts. For this part I’ll focus on Friend Finder Networks, an adult dating and entertainment company that was part of the fifth largest data breach. In 2016, due to hacking and lack of security, 412 million accounts were exposed.
This hack also includes the 339 million accounts on AdultFriendFinder.com and 14 million accounts that were meant to be deleted but the company held the data on their databases.
Overall the data accounts for two decades worth of data from the company’s largest site. As for the information in question I’m not sure what was taken.
That being said, Friend Finder Networks had another breach the year before which exposed 4 million accounts. The data taken from that was revolving around sexual preferences and whether someone was looking for extramarital affairs or not.
As for what information could’ve been taken it can be vast. Usernames, email addresses, date of last visit, passwords, membership data, whether the user paid for items and more.
And the reason I can only give this sort of vague information is to this date, when Friend Finder was approached about this breach, they confirmed the site vulnerability but never announced the breach of information. They’ve never publicly announced what was taken.
When the reporters on the breach discussed with users about this breach, some weren’t surprised because the security was rather flimsy. To further drive that point one user signed up by putting in fake information about who they are and accessing the site with no issues.
With that in mind the quality of information the hacker was able to obtain may not have been significant, but you can see themes with this story.
This site is similar to a social media networking site riddled with scandals.
It’s collecting information that isn’t entirely entirely necessary in order to fully experience the platform or use the service.
The site has poor security measures in place and did little to bring this up to peoples attention similar to so many other companies who’ve spent months or years keeping it under wraps.
And like with all of these cases, we need to learn to best protect ourselves. Have tighter passwords, be stingy about the information we give. And if you’re really that curious about something, you can always toss out fake information.