Hacking attacks on porn sites have increased over the last few months. As recent as March a hacker breached the networks of Paper Street Media and was able to steal email addresses and passwords of users of the porn network. After that, Forbes then reported that popular porn network, Naughty America, also encountered a breach of their networks which saw millions of users account details taken. Naughty America has around 46 other individual porn sites under it. MyFreeCams.com also had a security flaw which affected their models.
Through all this some networks have stayed untouched, and they intend to do so. Pornhub, one of the most popular independent free porn sites has started their own bug bounty program. The network is offering to pay around $50 and $25,000 to independent security researchers if they find any malware.
The Vice President at Pornhub, Corey Price, said the company’s decision to introduce the bug bounty program was as a result of the increased hacking events in the adult business network such as the Ashley Madison hackings and the Naughty America compromise. The attack on these two showed that the adult business was lucrative for hackers. The company hopes that the move will keep their site, which gets 60 million visits per day, safe.
The new public bug bounty program is a successor to the beta version of the program that the company ran last year, whereby participants managed to remove two dozen bugs, another of Pornhub’s spokesperson said.
HackerOne is the company responsible for running the program which also includes networks hosted on the HTTPS and cross domain linkage. Price mentioned that the company was a worldwide target encountering attacks from all parts of the world at any time. The attacks it has faced include automatic scanning or some powerful DDoS attacks.
One of the company’s main concerns, however, is malvertising, a form of advertising that cyber criminals do when they submit adverts that are filled with malware. The malware after the advert then enters into the company’s web pages. The adverts can also direct people to ransomware pages or banking trojans.
To fight the trend, the company said that they were relying on external vendors. The company has put so much into companies such as RiskIQ and Geoedge. The two companies are meant to help Pornhub to remove the malware containing ads from the site before they cause any damage.