A group of hackers calling themselves The Consortium is claiming to have accessed user data of over 70,000 users of the pornography website Digital Playground, according to Adult Video News.
The group also claims to have the credit card data -- including names, expiration dates and CVV codes -- for more than 40,000 of the members, but that it's not planning on using or releasing the information.
"...[W]e do this for the love of the game not for profit," a message purportedly written by the group said, according to the blog Naked Security, "and these peoples [sic] only crime was wanting some porn."
In response, Luxembourg-based Manwin, the parent company of Digital Playground, shut down the site on March 5. While Digital Playground is currently live again for existing members, it is not accepting any new users.
"The site is currently operational for members and will be fully operational before the end of the week," Kate Miller, a spokesperson for Manwin, told The Huffington Post.
Manwin has only owned Digital Playground since March 1, and the company said the hack may have happened before they officially became the new owner. However, a Twitter feed that PC Magazine reports belongs to The Consortium didn't announce the hack until March 4, four days after the sale become official.
This is at least the third time in two months that Manwin, which bills itself as "the largest network of adult websites in the world," has made headlines following a security breach.
In February, a third-party chat feature on the popular YouPorn website was breached, revealing the names and login information of as many as one million users. In a separate incident earlier in the month, a person claiming to be a 17-year-old living in Morocco said that he had accessed the information of more than 350,000 users of a website operated by Brazzers, another Manwin-owned company.
Unlike the Digital Playground breach, neither of these two prior incidents put credit card information at risk.
Chester Wisniewski, a Senior Security Advisor at Sophos, the Internet security company, said that in light of hacks like this, such as the breaches of Sony's Playstation Network and private security intelligence firm Stratfor -- people using credit cards online should take additional precautions.
Wisniewski suggested that whenever possible, those making online purchases should use a payment system like PayPal, Amazon Payments or Google Checkout, all of which limit online vendors' access to consumer financial data.
Wisniewski also suggested limiting the amount of unnecessary personal data -- like phone numbers and addresses -- that people make available on sites like Facebook, as this information can be used to get additional, more critical information, from banks.
"It sounds a bit paranoid and scared, but the less information that's out there, the better," Wisniewski said.
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Posted: 03/12/2012 7:33 pm Updated: 03/12/2012 7:48 pm