Recently, information from five different dating sites have leaked millions of their users’ private data. The sites cover users from the USA, Korea and Japan. On top of this, a variety of other niche dating apps (such as CougarD and 3Somes) had data breaches of their own that exposed hundreds of thousands of users’ profiles in May, including photos and audio recordings. This latter event occurred thanks to a misconfigured and open Amazon S3 storage bucket. Thankfully, the owner of the account quickly moved to secure it properly when they heard from security researchers. We haven’t heard much about dating site breaches since private data from some 30M Ashley Madison users were posted online in 2015.
In this time of the pandemic when more of us are doing everything we can online, dating remains a security sinkhole. This is because by its very nature, online dating means we eventually have to reveal a lot of personal information to our potential dating partners. How we do this is critical for maintaining both information security and personal safety. In this post for Avast’s blog I provide a bunch of pointers on how to do this properly and provide my own recommendations.
To enhance the existing threat detection technology that protects Avast online security users from ransomware, Avast antivirus protection software has introduced an extra layer that keeps files safe from ransomware and other malicious programs. Ransomware Shield stops ransomware and other untrusted programs from changing, deleting, or encrypting personal photos and files in protected folders.