The ‘Mastermind’ hacker who stole 20 million user credentials from Russian dating website Topface has got an extraordinary response from his victim – an undisclosed payment for “finding” the vulnerability
that led to the calamitous breach.
It’s an extraordinary turns of events that would be unthinkable in almost any other country but the site justified its decision with the argument that recovering the data would end the matter once and for all.
Recall that the hacker in question had tried to sell the stolen data on a crime forum which is where the breach was first noticed by a third party, US securty outfit Easy Solutions. Without that discovery the data would probably have been sold on without the site realising that a breach had happened in the first place.
