Russia-based dating website Topface says it’s investigating reports that the details of 20 million users have been stolen by hackers.
Fraud protection and black market monitoring company Easy Solutions reported uncovering a post from a hacker claiming to have obtained 20 million credentials belonging to the customers of the dating website. The hacker, who uses the online moniker “Mastermind,” claimed the credentials were 100% valid.
Topface has roughly 81 million users, according to the company’s website. The firm says over 50% of its customers are from outside Russia, particularly from Europe and the Americas.
According to Easy Solutions, 7 million of the email addresses are for Hotmail accounts, 2.5 million are for Yahoo, and 2.2 million are for Gmail.
“The list appears to be international in nature with hundreds of domains listed from all over the world,” said Daniel Ingevaldson, CTO of Easy Solutions.
Topface representatives say they’re investigating the reports, but so far they haven’t found any evidence to suggest that a data breach occurred.
“We have a sophisticated security system and will investigate whether we were hacked or not,” Topface Chief Executive Officer Dmitry Filatov told SecurityWeek in an email.
Filatov has pointed out that his company only stores email addresses, so it’s unlikely that the attackers gained access to any other personal information.
“Almost 100% of our users use Facebook and other social networks authorisation to access Topface and we have no access to their passwords or any secure data. We also never keep any payment information or other secure information about our users,” Filatov explained. “All the data that we have is e-mail address which can not be used alone to access any secure data. That is why we a pretty sure that our users will not have any problems even if any data was stolen from our service.”