The OnlyFans Hack
While scrolling through recent posts at Twitter earlier this evening I noticed that 'OnlyFans' was trending. Knowing that a couple of friends have accounts there, I wondered what might be going on, so clicked on the link.
According to the thousands of tweets that poured down the screen, the OnlyFans website had been hacked – somebody had downloaded terabytes of photos and videos from the site.
I headed for Google News next, and searched for the story – and found a couple of citizen journalism websites reporting a massive data breach, including account holders personal information.
It took me literally two minutes to find the source of the story – a public MEGA archive that was being shared around (that anybody with any search skills whatsoever could find). If you've never seen MEGA, it's a secure file sharing platform on the internet created by 'Kim Dot Com' – an entrepreneur that got into rather a lot of trouble with the authorities about fifteen years ago after giving people the ability to share files privately with each other (private enough that the platform operators couldn't discover what was being shared if they wanted to – let alone the police). Just GUESS what people OF COURSE used it for...
Anyway.
I had a look in the MEGA archive. It turns out it is NOT a breach or hack at all. Some colossal idiot has spent a great deal of time curating stolen glamour content from anywhere and everywhere they could get their hands on around the internet, and shared it all via MEGA – 1.6 terabytes of it.
The photos, videos, hacking, stealing, sharing, or whatever isn't what annoyed me. The thing that annoyed me was all the people jumping on the story on Twitter, either believing it without question, or (and this is even worse) trying to profit from the story in some way – dangling access to the archive as a carrot to attract attention to themselves, writing breathless posts about the supposed drama, or attempting to troll any known account holders with mean, hateful attacks about the end of their online career.
Why are people so bloody horrible ?