Have you driven a PORN… lately?
by WaltWhile I'm sure that no one who reads this blog would ever purchase porn online, there is some news for those poor souls who have. IBILL, a company that processes credit card payments for several sellers of pornography made what we call in the business, a little digital boo-boo:
Seventeen million customers of the online payment service iBill have had their personal information released onto the internet, where it's been bought and sold in a black market made up of fraud artists and spammers, security experts say.
-- Wired News
Names, phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses and internet IP addresses were all released, according to Wired's sources. But perhaps there's one piece of good news:
Other fields in the compromised databases appear to be logins and passwords, credit-card types and purchase amounts, but credit-card numbers are not included.
Because the information didn't include Social Security, credit-card or driver's-license numbers, no U.S. laws require iBill or the companies for which they provided billing to warn victims.
Additionally, this concerns OLD PORN. Well, not granny porn, but when the pornography was purchased. It only relates to porn that the credit card processed between 1998 and 2003.
Interesting side note: The discovery of the information leak happened because the information was actively being used by criminals "phishing" for information. So-called "phishers" will send a person an email claiming to be a bank with enough of the victim's information to sound legitimate, and request more identification, and then of course use that ID to clean out the victim's bank account or line of credit.
March 9th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
Thank goodness back then I was downloading my porn to my kid's computer and charging it to Walt's credit card.
The Perfessor