MyFreeCams.com, Popular Adult Site, May Put Models At Risk With Weak Passwords

One of the most popular adult webcam sites on the Internet looks like it's also one of the easiest to hack. MyFreeCams.com, an adult website claiming over 100,000 models and five million members, is forcing models to use weak passwords and not allowing them to use special characters, according to Vice Motherboard.

Weak cybersecurity is normal for adult websites, though the threat usually comes in the form of advertisements embedded with malicious software. In this case a model on My Free Cams could be harassed, or even stalked, if a subscriber is able to access her password, and thus her true identity and location (many of the models use pseudonyms). The site only allows models to use letters and numbers in their passwords, Motherboard reported Sunday, a violation of the most basic rules of password security.

“I'm deleting my MFC account due to the security issues,” one young woman told the site. “I knew MFC was sketchy but I had no idea the accounts were so easy to hack.”

Even if a model tries to include an upper case letter in their password, My Free Cams appears to automatically change the letter into a smaller case (the more complicated the password, the better). The site also appears to send users and models their full password in plain text after they click Forgot Password.

“That is an insanely stupid thing to do,” Per Thosheim, founder of PasswordsCon, told Motherboard. “We would like to see all kinds of online services and websites to actually make a statement somewhere on their pages: How do you store my password?”