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Porn cam network leaked sensitive data for thousands of models

About 20GB of data included names, addresses and more.

Data leaks by their nature subject people to some kind of unnecessary risk, but this latest could be genuinely dangerous. Researchers at vpnMentor have discovered that a porn cam affiliate network, PussyCash, left nearly 20GB of models' extremely sensitive data exposed in an Amazon S3 bucket. The repository included not only 875,000 keys for different file types (such as photos and videos), but personal info for over 4,000 models worldwide that includes their names, ID photos, passport/ID numbers, release forms and driver's license images. Some of the data could be up to 20 years old, but other info is just weeks old -- there's a very real chance stalkers, extortionists and others could have used this to threaten many of the models.

The PussyCash team never responded to vpnMentor's attempts at contact, although ImLive (one of the brands) eventually got back and said it would take care of the issue. It appears that the data was protected on January 9th. It's not certain if anyone besides the researchers accessed the content.

As the researchers noted, it wouldn't have been difficult for PussyCash to take some basic steps to lock down the data, including implementing access rules and requiring authentication. This was, simply speaking, unnecessary neglect -- and hard to understand in an era when data breaches are all too common.