The email addresses of several South African government officials have been noted in a hack on Brazzers’ forums which outed 800,000 user accounts.
While we usually enjoy hearing news about South Africans doing great things on the world stage, we’d rather bury our heads in the sand for this one. A recent hack on the forum of pornography website Brazzers has revealed the particulars of over 800,000 user accounts – several of which have been associated with South African government officials.
The breach, which was identified by monitoring site Vigilante.pw, reveals that the massive leak was made easy thanks to a weak database which was left unsecured; passwords were stored in plain text without hashing or salting measures in place to protect their identity.
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As a result, the database lists every email address and password associated with a user on the forums. The operator of Vigilante.pw, identified by the handle Keen, told MyBroadband that the database contains a reputed 519 email addresses linked to South African domains.
While many of those addresses were listed as co.za and org.za domains, four were listed as gov.za domains; the list revealed that individuals stemming from the Limpopo Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (lda.gov.za), Hantam Municipality in the Northern Cape (hantam.gov.za), the Department of Justice (justice.gov.za), and the South African Revenue Service (sars.gov.za) have been listed within the database.
Needless to say, if you own a Brazzers forum account, change your password.
Vigilante.pw offered that it alerted the media to the breach in an effort to raise awareness on security flaws around the web. “œWe aim to inform and teach people about the importance of maintaining your privacy on the Internet, as well as keeping your personal information safe,“ a spokesperson told MyBroadband.
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Follow Bryan Smith on Twitter: @bryansmithZA
Source: MyBroadband
