Penthouse and Adult Friend Finder hack leaves over 412 million accounts exposed

Email addresses, passwords, dates of visits, browser information and IP addresses have all been released

AdultFriendFinder has been hacked once before (Screengrab)

Adult dating website Friend Finder Networks are reported to have been hacked.

The attack, which took place in October, is thought to have compromised more than 412 million accounts, which would make it one of the largest breach of data in history. Email addresses, passwords, dates of visits, browser information and IP addresses have all been exposed, according to monitoring firm Leaked Source.

Friend Finder Networks operates Adult Friend Finder, which bills itself as “one of the world’s largest sex hook-up websites” as well as several other adult websites, including Penthouse.com, which has over 7 million users.

Diana Ballou, vice president and senior counsel at Friend Finders Networks, said they had received a number of reports that there were security vulnerabilities.

“While a number of these claims proved to be false extortion attempts, we did identify and fix a vulnerability that was related to the ability to access source code through an injection vulnerability,” Ms Ballou told ZDnet.

Most of the data was apparently stored as plain text, meaning personal information was extremely exposed, Forbes reported.

The leaked data base also includes 16 million deleted accounts, 78,301 US military and 5,650 US government email addresses.

Almost a decade ago, Penthouse bought parent company Various for $500 million and assumed control of AdultFriendFinder. Penthouse.com was then sold off in February of this year, making it unclear why Friend Finder Networks still had the database of user details.

It is not the first time Adult Friend Network has been hacked. Last year details of four million users were leaked onto the dark web.

The hack is the biggest since the details of 359 million MySpace users were released in 2013.