By now, most everyone has heard about the YouPorn Chat break in. John Graham-Cumming has the details. Due to very sloppy security YouPorn exposed the email addresses and passwords for many of their customers who signed up in 2008 and later. I’m guessing that there are a lot of very nervous spouses about now.
The story is actually a little worse than that according to Graham-Cumming. In addition to the email addresses at least some of the records included phone numbers, date of birth, username, and country. All of this information was in a plain text file. With no encryption. On a public server. How does this happen? Did Sony and the others teach these people nothing?
I suppose the good news for YouPorn Chat is that few, if any, of their customers will be inclined to anything public—like filing a law suit—about this and given the nature of their service, they may not even lose many customers. Still, there really is no excuse for this sort of behavior on the part of Web services and all it takes is one angry, single, customer to take these guys to the cleaners. If that happens, it will be hard to avoid the schadenfreude.