Beautifulpeople.com – an elite dating site that only permits attractive people to sign up – has reportedly had private information about more than a million users leaked.
The data breach is understood to have seen addresses, mobile phone numbers, sexual preferences, incomes and some 15 million private messages offered for sale on the dark web.
Beautifulpeople.com seeks to exclude people deemed unattractive from its community by having existing users rate them as part of the registration process.
The site markets itself as “a playground for the aesthetically blessed” and claims to have spawned 700 marriages, as well as a number of TV and modelling careers for members scouted online.
Last December, security researcher Chris Vickery made the curious discovery while browsing through Shodan, a search engine that lets people look for internet-connected devices.
Vickery informed Beautiful People that its database was exposed, and the site quickly moved to secure it. Apparently, though, it didn’t move quickly enough; at some point, the dataset was acquired by an unknown party, which is now selling it on the black market.
The site said in a statement, “The breach involves data that was provided by members prior to mid July 2015. No more recent user data or any data relating to users who joined from mid July 2015 onward is affected. All impacted members are, of course, being notified once again. The data does not contain any credit card information and user passwords are encrypted.”