Manwin endures more hacking as Digital Playground has 40,000 credit cards stolen

Posted by Paffg in the News, section.

Porn site Digital Playground was taken offline after hacker group The Consortium breached their defences to steal the details of more than 73,000 subscribers.

The hacker group posted some of the data they stole, including user names, email addresses and passwords, as well as credit card details for 40,000 cards, online, saying that the security was a joke: “This company has security, that if we didn’t know it was a real business, we would have thought to be a joke – a joke that we found much more amusing than they will”.

While Digital Playground is now back online, it is no longer accepting new members pending a full investigation.

Digital Playground is a California based company, but its website is run by Manwin, an adult entertainment IT company based in Luxembourg. Manwin has said that it took over management of the site on March 1st, while the hack may have occurred before it took charge.

This is not the first time that Manwin have been involved in a hacking scandal, however. In Febuary, YouPorn’s discussion forum’s, YPChat, were hacked, and details of more than 6,000 users were stolen. This breach was blamed on lax security at a third party provider. Before this, though, a larger scandal took place as 350,000 details were compromised from the forum of porn site Brazzers.

In this case no credit card information was stolen, but login details including user names, passwords and email addresses were posted to the internet in an attempt, according to the lone hacker, to draw attention to the site’s vulnerabilities. These three attacks, while not directly linked, have all drawn unwanted attention to the web security provided by Manwin.

With hackers in the spotlight recently, The Consortium, which claims to be connected to the well known hacker groups Anonymous and Lulzsec, claims that some credit card information from the Digital Playground site was stored in plain text form. With no profit to be made by these hackers, their attempts at making holes in web security public knowledge are causing embarrassment for a number of firms.

Yet this third attack on Manwin sites in the past couple of months is the first to put credit card data at risk, even though the hackers claim it will not be used.