Online dating site Topface has completed its investigation into the breach that exposed 20 million user email addresses. It has also managed to fix the issue without compromising user data.
A report from Easy Solutions, released last week, states that a hacker managed to steal information from servers and is offering it for sale to the highest bidder.
The COT of the dating company reported that the list includes more than seven million Hotmail addresses, 2.5 million from Yahoo, and 2.2 million from Gmail.
Today, the CEO of Topface, Dimitry Filatov, said via message that user information is safe and the risk has now been eliminated.
This was achieved by finding and contacting the hacker who stole the data from the dating site, who agreed to withdraw it from the market and not sell it.
In exchange, Topface decided not to file any lawsuit and also gave him a reward of several thousand dollars for finding the vulnerability in the service.
Furthermore, the hacker, under the alias Mastermind, agreed to cooperate with the company based in Russia to improve data protection measures. Filatov reports that Mastermins will report the vulnerabilities as soon as he discovers them..
It is worth noting that the email addresses were the only data the hacker took from the dating site. Passwords and content associated with user accounts, such as private messages or images, were never exposed to risk.
According to the statistics provided by the site, more than 91 million users use the service, with more than half of them located in countries outside Russia.
