A popular sexting website has exposed thousands of photo IDs belonging to models and sex workers who earn commissions from the site.
SextPanther, an Arizona-based adult site, stored over 11,000 identity documents on an exposed Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage bucket, including passports, driver’s licenses, and Social Security numbers, without a password. The company says on its website that it uses to verify the ages of models who users communicate with.
Most of the exposed identity documents contain personal information, such as names, home addresses, dates of birth, biometrics, and their photos.
Although most of the data came from models in the U.S., some of the documents were supplied by workers in Canada, India, and the United Kingdom.
The site allows models and sex workers to earn money by exchanging text messages, photos, and videos with paying users, including explicit and nude content. The exposed storage bucket also contained over a hundred thousand photos and videos sent and received by the workers.
It was not immediately clear who owned the storage bucket. TechCrunch asked U.K.-based penetration testing company Fidus Information Security, which has experience in discovering and identifying exposed data, to help.
Researchers at Fidus quickly found evidence suggesting the exposed data could belong to SextPanther.
An hour after we alerted the site’s owner, Alexander Guizzetti, to the exposed data, the storage bucket was pulled offline.
“We have passed this on to our security and legal teams to investigate further. We take accusations like this very seriously,” Guizzetti said in an email, who did not explicitly confirm the bucket belonged to his company.
Using information from identity documents matched against public records, we contacted several models whose information was exposed by the security lapse.
“I’m sure I sent it to them,” said one model, referring to her driver’s license which was exposed. (We agreed to withhold her name given the sensitivity of the data.) We passed along a photo of her license as it found in the exposed bucket. She confirmed it was her license, but said that the information on her license is no longer current.
“I truly feel awful for others whom have signed up with their legit information,” she said.
The security lapse comes a week after researchers found a similar cache of highly sensitive personal information of sex workers on adult webcam streaming site, PussyCash.
More than 850,000 documents were insecurely stored in another unprotected storage bucket.
Read more:
- GPS trackers leak real-time locations and can remotely activate its microphone
- A Sprint contractor left thousands of US cell phone bills on the internet by mistake
- Over 750,000 applications for US birth certificate copies exposed online
- Tuft & Needle exposed thousands of customer shipping labels
- ‘Magic: The Gathering’ game maker exposed 452,000 players’ account data
Got a tip? You can send tips securely over Signal and WhatsApp to +1 646-755–8849.
