Sensitive information containing addresses, mobile phone numbers, sexual preferences and incomes is reportedly traded online.
An elite dating site that only allows attractive people to sign up has reportedly had private data about more than a million users leaked.
The data breach is noted to have seen addresses, mobile phone numbers, sexual preferences, benefits and some 15 million private messages proposed for sale on the dark web.
#Beautifulpeople .com tries to exclude people considered unattractive from its community by having living users rate them as part of the registration rule.
The site markets itself as “a playground for the aesthetically blessed” and declares to have produced 700 marriages, as well as some TV and modelling careers for members scouted online.
But it has dragged controversy for denying millions of “ugly” people admittance to the site and claiming to have collected thousands of members for gaining weight.
According to Forbes, details of the breach concerning 1.1 million daters first appeared in December 2015, when beautifulpeople.com said the compromised data had come from a test server, which had been quickly locked down.
But Australian security specialist Troy Hunt said contacts in “data trading circles” had since affirmed the data had made it on to the dark web, where it was being birded around by online criminals.
He told Forbes: “We’re looking at more than 100 individual data traits per person – everything you’d anticipate from a site of this nature is in there.”
Mr Hunt, who is also a regional director for Microsoft, and Forbes announced they had verified that some leaked accounts were genuine with users of the site – although “a handful” of emails in the information dump did not appear to be linked to the site.
Sky News has contacted beautifulpeople.com for comment.
The leak minimised by last year’s hack of adultery website Ashley Madison – which examined around 37 million users exposed.
In February a hacker claimed to have collected user data from another dating site – Mate1 – proposing 27 million user passwords for sale.
Beautiful People Website Loss Hits 1.1m Users
27/04/2016