If you pay for Pornhub Premium, you’ve got more problems than someone seeing that charge show up on your credit card bill. According to a report from Bleeping Computer, a prominent hacking group is currently holding the data of PornHub’s paying members hostage as part of an extortion attempt.
The situation started when the hacking group, ShinyHunters, managed to breach third-party analytics vendor Mixpanel with an SMS phishing attack back in November. That gave the group access to a significant amount of records associated with companies that work with Mixpanel, including OpenAI and, obviously, Pornhub. Now that data is being used to try to extort Pornhub into making a payment to make the situation go away—a strategy that has successfully netted the group significant paydays from other breach victims like AT&T.
Pornhub has confirmed that some Premium user data has been compromised. In a security notice sent to users, the company disclosed:
“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. Passwords, payment details, and financial information remain secure and were not exposed.”
Credit card numbers and passwords are obviously very sensitive information, but a breach at a porn company means they may not be the most personal bits of data sitting on the servers. ShinyHunters claims to have about 94GB worth of data from PornHub users, about 201 million records in total. And while it may not contain a person’s payment information, the hacking group showed Bleeping Computer that the records do contain a user’s search history, watch history, and download activity. It also contains user email addresses, linking their activity to something personally identifiable. So it’s a little hard for PornHub to suggest this is largely a nothingburger of a breach.
Notably, Pornhub does say that it hasn’t worked with Mixpanel, the company that suffered the breach, since 2021. So it is likely that the records the hackers have gotten hold of are older, though that wouldn’t make having that data get leaked any less embarrassing for the victims.
Even though the breach didn’t hit Pornhub’s systems directly, it’s a chilling reminder that these companies increasingly need people’s data to operate. We are now largely trusting companies like Pornhub and the vendors it works with to check and store government IDs as part of the ongoing efforts by states and countries to restrict underage access to adult content online.
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