Popular adult website YouPorn has been caught in an awkward position after users' account information was laid bare by hackers.
According to security blogger Anders Nilsson, the email addresses, passwords and birthdates of over one million users were made publicly accessible.
A Naked Security blog post claimed YouPorn - one of the top 100 most popular websites in the world - has been publishing users' data in a public fashion since 2007. These practices were blamed for the security breach.
While YouPorn has shut down the breached server, hackers are still sifting through the information and reposting it elsewhere online.
After the initial shock and embarrassment of this exposure, users now have to worry about the security of their online identity.
With users' email addresses and passwords now publicly accessible, it may be easy for hackers to use this information to break into users' email, Amazon, PayPal, and Facebook accounts, because many still use the same password for multiple accounts.
However, a YouPorn official blog post stated that, contrary to news reports, only YP Chat account information has been released.
"The real focus of the recent news is YP Chat, an entirely separate service that was linked to from YouPorn.com," Brad Black, YouPorn vice president of operations, wrote in the blog post.
"The chat service is owned and operated by a third party and is in no way associated with YouPorn.com."
Black has assured that YouPorn has taken steps to prevent further damage and remedy the situation.
"As soon as we, at YouPorn.com, became aware of the issue we took immediate steps to block access to YP Chat entirely and a thorough investigation was launched to evaluate the scope of the issue," he said.
However, the release of passwords and email account information is still problematic for those who have used the same log-ins for both sites.
"The security of our users' information has always been and will always be of paramount importance to us and the fact that a third-party service provider's poor security practices could have such a negative impact on YouPorn users is disheartening to say the least," Black said.
