YouPorn was caught in a compromising position, as 6,255 e-mail addresses of their subscribers were posted in Pastebin accompanied by their passwords because of a coding error in the sex-chat associated with them.

“Looking at the data, it seems like a careless programmer accidentally left debug logging on to a publicly accessible URL as early as November 2007, and it has been storing all registrations ever since,” said Anders Nilsson, CTO at Swedish security distributor EuroSecure, in a blog post. “The data was found by someone sweeping websites for publicly accessible, but non-linked (‘hidden’) folders, looking for either porn or sensitive material like this, and struck gold.”

Manwin Holding SARL which operates YP disabled the service and will remain inaccessible pending investigation.

“YouPorn continues to ensure that all appropriate measures and tools are in place to maintain the security of its infrastructure, and to safeguard the privacy of its users,” Manwin spokeswoman Kate Miller said in a statement.

This may not alarm most people, and some may even find this amusing, but those who frequent YP aren’t laughing once their bosses, co-workers, spouses/life-partners, see their e-mail address on the list.  Furthermore, many people are fond of using the same password for multiple accounts, so many YP subscribers could find themselves a victim of identity theft.  A major concern for those that have used PayPal or Amazon to purchase items on the web.

No one has owned up to the hack or the leak.

To help you take steps towards avoiding identity theft, technology researcher Ashkan Soltani made a word cloud of the most popular stolen passwords.  This YP incident teaches us to be mindful of the passwords we use, and not to use the same password across multiple platforms.

On another porn-related note, Best Buy’s corporate office apologized for “extremely, extremely pornographic image,” that flashed in their smart TV displays seen by customers, including children.

“Two individuals accessed our store’s wireless signal to broadcast inappropriate content on a smart television display,” Best Buy said in a statement.  “In both cases, we worked immediately to disable the inappropriate content.  We greatly apologize for this unfortunate incident and we are working to ensure that it does not happen again.”