Thousands of personal data of sex workers and customers accessible unprotected on the Internet

Thousands of personal data of sex workers and customers accessible unprotected on the Internet

New York, January 27, 2020

VpnMentor experts have discovered an unsecured Amazon Web Services data container with over 11,000 personal documents. They included Names, home addresses, dates of birth, biometric data, photos of employees, passports, driver’s licenses, social security and credit card numbers as well as fingerprints. There were also over 10,000 explicit videos and pictures. Almost every zip file contained everything a criminal needs to easily impersonate another.

Other documents included handwritten biographies that told of sexual preferences and fantasies, hopes and dreams, and favorite foods and music. Some of the files were reportedly only a few weeks old, while others could be up to 20 years old.

The personal information of thousands of sex films belonging to the SextPanther website has been published online. Arizona-based SextPanther lets customers phone, text, and chat with sex workers for a fee.

Just a week earlier, similar data was discovered online by an adult webcam streaming site.

For data subjects, data exposed in this way represents both a financial and a physical security risk. The type and amount of data offer criminals the best conditions for fraud involving identity theft. The researchers pointed out that the data is „information that we see regularly on the dark web, often at very attractive prices“. The consequences of such a leak have many effects. Some of those affected should expect the lives of the models / actors involved to be ruined.

„For some, live webcams are an important outlet for adults,“ explained one researcher. “Others are obsessed with a certain cam model and suddenly have a strong desire to meet them. There are those who would do this and chase the model if they had enough information about them … Stalking is a gateway to a number of additional threats, including harassment, rape, kidnapping and even murder. „

The models exposed by the websites come from all over the world and are subject to different pornography laws. As a result, actors whose identities are revealed could find themselves in desperate situations.

According to the researchers, the websites could easily have avoided information disclosure by introducing a password or other security measures and otherwise securing the servers that store the data.