CouchSurfing: leak for 16.9 million users

No official communications have yet been received from the top of the platform, but ZDNet certainly gives a violation of CouchSurfing, a portal used by users all over the world to find a place to stay while on the move. There is talk of a database containing the personal information of 16.9 million users offered for sale for $ 700 on a forum dedicated to hacking and through some Telegram channels.

Leak CouchSurfing: data online of users

The leak would already be investigated by some security experts appointed by the company. Also notify the authorities of the incident, as required by current regulations. The archive would contain updated data for this month and would have started circulating last week. Including usernames used for authentication, names, surnames, email addresses and profile settings on the service. Passwords are apparently absent.



Founded in 2004 with headquarters in San Francisco and now operating on a global scale, CouchSurfing is among the top 11,000 most active sites in the world according to the ranking of Alexa. It currently has about 12 million registered users, but the highest number of leaks is justified by the fact that a few years ago the platform eliminated those that had been inactive for a long time: the stolen database could also contain information relating to the latter.

The causes that led to the violation are unknown: one theory is that which speculates an error in the management of backups. In the wrong hands, data could be used for spam, phishing or malware distribution campaigns.

Source: ZDNet