The dating site Guardian Soulmates was recently hit with sexually explicit spam emails, Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of web security firm High-Tech Bridge comments:
“So far, I don’t see many reasons for panic - the number of confirmed spam emails is very insignificant compared to the entire Soulmates database. Therefore, we can reasonably suppose that only a small amount of data was breached or leaked. Moreover, the spam campaign is apparently classic spam ads, and not a sophisticated targeted attack against website users. It’s difficult to make any conclusions without additional technical details about the incident, but the data can even come from public sources – many users of dating websites (un)intentionally expose their profile with their email on social networks for example.
Nonetheless, we cannot reliably exclude that the database was not compromised and this is just a test before a large-scale spear phishing campaign against Soulmates’ users. Therefore, I’d recommend changing your Soulmates passwords and stay particularly vigilant these days – it’s certainly won’t harm you to do so.”