Hackers target dating site for beautiful people

The details of members of an elitist dating website that claims only to admit beautiful people have been leaked online.

BeautifulPeople.com has 1.1 million members.

The sexual preferences of members of an elitist dating website that claims only to admit beautiful people have been posted online after an apparent data theft.

Names, dates of birth, drinking habits, salaries and physical attributes are among the details leaked from BeautifulPeople.com, many of whose 1.1 million members are based in the UK. Their location data, in the form of latitude and longitude, were also leaked.

The website, which claims to be the largest internet dating community exclusively for the beautiful, has courted controversy with claims that it culls members who become “ugly” after being accepted. It has also suggested that Irish men are among the least attractive in the world.

Applicants are told to post photographs, information about their height, weight, hair colour, body type, field of work and several other personal details. Members then rank applicants on a scale of “absolutely not” to “beautiful”.

Other information posted online includes beauty ratings, educational details, genders, job titles, passwords, personal descriptions, interests, smoking habits and whether members own a car or a house, according to Troy Hunt, a security researcher.

Chris Vickery, another security expert, told Forbes that 15 million private messages, some of which contained salacious requests, had also been leaked. The data was being traded online, Mr Hunt added.

BeautifulPeople said that the breach involved data from before mid-July 2015 and that members were being notified. The data did not contain credit card information and passwords were encrypted, the company said, adding: “The privacy and security of our members is of paramount importance to us and this matter is being investigated.”

A similar leak in July last year affected Ashley Madison, a site that targeted married people with its slogan “life is short — have an affair”. One suicide was linked to the incident after hackers sent letters threatening to expose the site’s members to their spouses. Some 1.2 million of the site’s 37.6 million users were thought to be in Britain. [The website claims to have 1 million Australian members.]

Mr Hunt has uploaded leaked data from BeautifulPeople and Ashley Madison as well as several other sites to HaveIBeenPwned.com, a website that helps potential victims to discover if their information has been compromised. The data uploaded by Mr Hunt is in a private section of the site that can only be searched by owners of verified email addresses.

The latest leak is perhaps more serious than an incident in 2011, in which BeautifulPeople claimed that a virus called Shrek, named after a film character famed for his ugliness, had allowed thousands of unattractive people to gain membership without being vetted.

Greg Hodge, the company’s managing director, said at the time: “We have sincere regret for the unfortunate people who were wrongly admitted to the site and who believed, albeit for a short while, that they were beautiful. It must be a bitter pill to swallow, but better to have had a slice of heaven then never to have tasted it at all.

“We have to stick to only accepting beautiful people — that’s what our members have paid for. We can’t just sweep 30,000 ugly people under the carpet.”

The Times