Details of over 1.1 million people who were registered on the dating website BeautifulPeople.com have been traded on the Dark Web.
Today, Troy Hunt, the administrator of the website HaveIBeenPwned.com, announced on Twitter that he had just added the details of these users to his website. People who registered with BeautifulPeople.com can go to Hunt's service and search for their email address to see if their details were included in the leak.
Thomas Fox-Brewster, a Forbes staff writer, claims he was aware of the data breach since December 2015, when MacKeeperChris Vickery told him about an unprotected database.
Both contacted BeautifulPeople, who told them that the database they had discovered was only a test server and that no real user information was exposed.
The company took down the server, another example of a passwordless, Internet-accessible MongoDB database, and the story never saw the light of day.
But, as Hunt explained, it appears that someone discovered the database, downloaded its contents, and put it up for sale on underground data trading forums. A mysterious benefactor donated the data to Hunt, who, along with a Forbes reporter, confirmed its authenticity.
Both say the database includes names, email addresses, encrypted passwords, geographic information and over 100 other personal characteristics, such as sexual preferences, hobbies, favorite movies and other types of information you would expect to find on these sites.
Vickery also adds that the version of the BeautifulPeople database he saw includes over 15 million private messages.
BeautifulPeople has a pretty bad reputation online because, for many years, it advertised itself as a dating and meeting site only for “beautiful people.” All users had to go through a manual approval process where other users of the site would vote on whether they were attractive enough to join the site.
In 2009, the operators of BeautifulPeople boasted of rejecting 1.8 million people from their site. Finally, as people aged, lost their hair, or gained weight, the site's staff regularly removed members they deemed not beautiful enough.
