Parent company denies blunder, says exposed data was fake

Oct 4, 2016 17:05 GMT  ·  By

A New Zealand-based company has secured a database holding information on over 1.5 million users that have signed up for several of the dating sites and mobile application the company operates.

C&Z Tech Limited, the dating site operator, had secured the database in question after security experts from the Mackeeper Security Research Center had alerted the company to the issue.

In an email sent to the Mackeeper team, C&Z said the database contained only test data, an assessment which the Mackeeper team does not believe to be true.

  Thanks for letting us know, the MongoDB database was only live for a few hours as we were testing migrating data from SQL to MongoDB, so most of them were just dummy data with randomly generated emails and passwords, and not our live database, we shut down the database about an hour ago, and there're no data breach, only you guys had detected it.  

C&Z Tech Limited operates several dating sites such as haveafling.mobi, haveafling.co.nz, haveanaffair.co.nz, haveanaffair.mobi, hookupdating.mobi, but also a few mobile applications.

Database held 1.5 million plaintext passwords

The Mackeeper team says that this database contained the personal details of over 1.5 million users that have signed up for these services, which advertise themselves as sites for finding one night stands or finding partners for extramarital affairs.

The Mackeeper team says the data included usernames, plaintext passwords, dates of birth, height, weight, gender, body type, race, IP addresses, country of origin, and other information usually stored inside a dating site. None of C&Z's website listed a visible security alert on its website.

The database is a MongoDB instance, a NoSQL database solution that for a few versions a few years back has used a default configuration file that exposed the database to the Internet without an admin account password.

Other dating sites that suffered data breaches in the past years include Fling.com, Mate1, Beautiful People, and Ashley Madison.