Information related to seventeen million users of an online porn payment service has been found to have been compromised, according to Wired News:

Wired News: Porn billing leak exposes buyers

Seventeen million customers of the online payment service iBill have had their personal information released onto the internet, where it's been bought and sold in a black market made up of fraud artists and spammers, security experts say.

The stolen data, examined by Wired News, includes names, phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses and internet IP addresses. Other fields in the compromised databases appear to be logins and passwords, credit-card types and purchase amounts, but credit-card numbers are not included.

The breach has broad privacy implications for the victims. Until it was brought low by legal and financial difficulties, iBill was a top credit-card processor for adult entertainment websites -- providing billing services for such outlets as DominaBDSM and Top-Nude.com.

The transactions documented in the database are dated between 1998 and 2003, spanning a period at the height of iBill's success.

The company didn't respond to repeated e-mail and telephone inquires by Wired News.

Two caches of stolen iBill customer data were discovered separately by two security companies while conducting routine research into malicious software online.

Southern California-based Secure Science Corporation found the first data file containing records on 17 million individuals on a private website set up by scammers. The site was part of a so-called "phishing" scheme, in which a spamming fraudster poses as a bank or online retailer in an attempt to con consumers out of identification and financial information.

Secure Science found that data in February 2005, and reported it to the FBI's Miami field office, the company says. The FBI declined comment.

Important Note: Since publication of this article, iBill has spoken with Wired News. The company now says that the purportedly stolen database did not originate with iBill, and only three of the more than 17 million entries match past iBill customers. Asked to respond, Secure Science says it no longer believes that iBill was the source of the data. Read the full story.

Technorati tags: Privacy :: Personal Information :: Porn :: Incident.

Labels: information breaches, law enforcement