Pornhub users under threat as hackers demand ransom over leaked data

Hacking group "ShinyHunters" has claimed responsiblity for stealing Pornhub data that belonged to the website's premium customers. The group 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 with Reuters which the news agency has also partialy confirmed to be true.

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

Meanwhile, Mixpanel denied the claims by ShinyHunters that the Pornhub data leak was owing 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 36 billion yearly visits on its websites that makes it one of the most popular mediums of sexual content on the internet.

What data do hackers have?

As per the BleepingComputer report, ShinyHunters has begun extorting Mixpanel customers from last week by sending them emails which began with "We are ShinyHunters" while warning them that their stolen data would be stolen if the ransom data was not met.

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

Pornhub on data leak:

Pornhub had 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 had launched an internal investigation and ‘engaged with relevant authorities and with Mixpanel’. Pornhub says that it is ‘working diligently to determine the nature and scope of the reported incident.’