In March 2016 a hacker gained access to a porn website called, Team Skeet, and was able to steal data from 237,000 users of the site. The hacker gained administrative rights and was able to access email addresses, plain text passwords, names and IP addresses.
Hacker Breaches Team Skeet Adult Network, Puts Data Up for Sale on the Dark Web https://t.co/L5WX0zTh56 @Softpedia pic.twitter.com/xJys8w0tuO
— David Bisson (@DMBisson) April 2, 2016
It is for this reason that experts are warning porn providers to increase their security in order to avoid further breaches. As a result, websites PornHub and YouPorn announced that they will be switching on HTTPs, which will protect data in transit between the users of the browsers and the website servers. Both PornHub and YouPorn are owned by the same parent company, MindGeek.
Corey Price, PornHub vice president, said that security is of paramount importance and needs to be considered by all porn sites:
"With this internet communication protocol we can ensure not only the security of our platform, but also that of our users."
HTTPS Benefits
One advantage of this system is that it can protect data such as passwords or any information entered onto a website. This means that if a hacker tries to penetrate the system they will find it a lot more challenging to gain access to sensitive information.
"Here at PornHub, with more than 70 million daily visitors, we wanted to continue our concerted effort to maximize the privacy of our users, ensuring that what they do on our platform remains strictly confidential. With the switch to HTTPS we are able to protect their identity as well as safeguard them against exposure to malware by third parties," said Corey Price.
HTTPS also helps users distinguish between whether they are visiting a genuine website and not an imposter site, which could contain malware.
As well as combating malware delivery, one of the principal benefits of HTTPS encryption is that it makes it harder for an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to monitor traffic. If the site is using HTTPS, it will not be able to see which individual pages you browsed.
Brad Burns, vice president of YouPorn has said that customer confidentiality is a key factor for them.
"As one of the most viewed websites in the world, it is our duty to ensure the confidentially and safety of our users," Brad Burns said.
However, is HTTPs as 100 percent secure as YouPorn and PornHub would have everyone believe?
A challenge to HTTPS implementation is that it requires any content coming in from a third-party — such as ads — to be HTTPS compliant.
In addition to this, for a video-heavy site like PornHub and YouPorn, there's the added challenge of finding a content delivery network — these are the companies that own the servers and shuttle web pages and videos across the internet — that would be willing to take on that volume of encrypted video.
PornHub switched to HTTPS on March 31 and YouPorn will follow suit on April 4.
