Stripchat’s vulnerability exposed 200 million records

Researchers found a database containing a large number of sensitive information about users and models on the Internet, without any protection. This data leak puts models and users at risk of being blackmailed and intimidated.

Stripchat is a very popular website, established in 2016, headquartered in Cyprus, mainly for mannequin-related business.

Researchers from the security agency reported that he discovered the database on an Elasticsearch cluster on November 5. The database contains about 200 million Stripchat records, including 65 million user records, including e-mail addresses, IP addresses, the amount of tips they gave the models, account creation time, and the time stamp of the last activity.

Another database contains approximately 421,000 records of models on the platform, including their username, gender, studio ID, tipping menu, and live broadcast status.

It is unclear whether any attackers had entered the database before the database was secured on November 7.

Threats posed by data exposure

The exposure of these data may pose a major privacy risk to Stripchat users and models. If the data is stolen, they may face harassment, humiliation, stalking, blackmail, phishing and other threats.

The user and model information of the website is also likely to be used in targeted phishing attacks.

Security researchers warn that victims should be wary of targeted phishing emails that pretend to be Stripchat or related companies. Never click on links or attachments in unverified emails.

If the exposed information is combined with other behaviors of the user, then the privacy risk of the user and the model will become more serious, at this time, a complete outline of a person will be drawn. In fact, the data in the Stripchat database does not reveal too much personal information. I feel that many users who visit such websites will not use their real identities, emails, etc., and most of them will use VPN services to hide them. IP address. Nevertheless, many of these information can be combined and matched with other leaked information, and we can also find many other information.

On November 5, Stripchat received a notification that the data was exposed, and communicated with multiple contact points and security personnel on Twitter via email in a timely manner. Although the company did not directly respond to the security company’s disclosures, he said that as of November 7, the data was safe.

Sites like Stripchat should have stronger security precautions. When receiving such alerts from the security community, at least timely security emergency response measures must be taken.

Beware of obscene phishing website attacks

According to a research report published by GreatHorn last summer, obscene phishing decoys are increasingly being used in commercial email intrusion (BEC) attacks. The company found that social engineering attacks using obscene materials rose by an astonishing 974%, most of which targeted employees whose names sounded like men.

According to the report, it does not use specific materials to deceive, and its purpose is to make users lose their psychological balance and be frightened. Any excitement will reduce the brain’s ability to make rational decisions.

The current pandemic is good news for sites like Stripchat. The company said that after the pandemic and blockade, the platform’s traffic rose by 72% and added 906,181,416 new users in 2020.

However, as the users of these platforms increase, they have become larger targets.

The phenomenon of cloud information being leaked has always existed

Stripchat has become one of many cloud information leakage companies. VIP gaming company exposed the user data of 66,000 users in early 2021. Dating sites, and even Hobby Lobby, have been attacked by cyberattacks due to incorrect configuration. And this is not just in the private sector. Last summer, Diachenko discovered an exposed Elasticsearch cluster, which contained 1.9 million user list records.

When it comes to public-facing cloud storage, security researchers call on companies to do more to protect their data.

Whether it is due to a misconfiguration of the public cloud or a vulnerability in any service exposed on the Internet, information leakage is a big problem. Enterprises need to continuously monitor all resources deployed in the enterprise to minimize the risk of such information exposure. Such records can be sold on the dark web or used for further attacks.