PornHub Was Reportedly Hacked

PornHub receives 80 million visitors a day, but the website may have been hacked. According to Independent, Pornhub was hacked. The news outlet reports a secret advertisement has been running on the site for more than a year. The ad would infiltrate a user’s computer and then have their device taken over, without their knowledge. While the problem was shut down as soon as it was discovered, Independent writer Andrew Griffin suggests “the damage could have spread across the Internet.”

The hack worked by showing a user an advertisement on the website that appeared to be a browser or operating system update. A user would mistakenly click the ad and install the software. Once it was installed, the software could take over a users’ computer and use it to click on fake ads, putting the owner’s safety in jeopardy. Independent reports, Proofpoint, a cybersecurity firm, discovered the software.

“While the payload, in this case, is ad fraud malware, it could just as easily have been ransomware, an information stealer, or any other malware,” Proofpoint said. “Regardless, threat actors are following the money and looking to more effective combinations of social engineering, targeting and pre-filtering to infect new victims at scale.”

This news comes after the website invested in artificial intelligence to help millions of visitors find the right content they are looking for. Instead of hiring someone to go through the hundreds of thousands of videos and tag them by hand the company his hiring machines to do it instead.

“Ultimately, we want to provide our fans with whatever it is they have a penchant for and our new model will be able to surface more accurate results for them, which will hopefully keep them coming back for more,” said Corey Price, PHub VP. “It’s all about continuously updating our platform to provide our fans with the latest in technology to make their experience on our platform as seamless as possible. The easier it is to navigate and access what they want, the happier they will be.”

The computer program can identify specific actors in scenes and even various positions and physical attributes. While it is difficult to describe the set of features of the machine-learning application, the system can identify individual performers in real time.

“So far we’ve used the model on about 500k featured videos which include user submitted and we plan to scan the whole library in the beginning of 2018,” said Price. “Very shortly, the technology will also be used to detect various sex positions / categories and be able to properly tag them as well.”

PornHub is reinventing facial detection and categorizing videos and images based on various attributes. That means you will be able to search and find content based on characteristics and names.