Security News > 2011 > April > Porn Star HIV Test Database Leaked
http://gawker.com/#!5787392/porn-star-hiv-test-database-leaked By Adrian Chen Gawker.com March 30, 2011 The patient database of the private health clinic that conducts STD tests for California's porn industry has been breached, exposing test results and personal details about thousands of current and former porn performers, some of which have been published on a Wikileaks-style website. Earlier this year, a website called Porn Wikileaks posted a list of what it claimed were the real names of more than 15,000 porn performers past and present, alongside their stage names and dates of birth. This essentially "outed" them to any passing Googler, which caused an uproar in the industry since many porn performers try to keep their real name secret, for obvious reasons. That 15,000 names were on the list was significant, especially considering only about 1,200-1,500 performers are currently working in California's Porn Valley. It turns out that many of the names came from a database belonging to the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation (AIM), which conducts the majority of STD tests for the porn industry. (Working straight performers get tested at least once every 28 days.) The porn gossip blogger Mike South first reported the breach after he was contacted by a number of porn performers who said the information posted about them on Porn Wikileaks must have come from AIM's database. Their proof: They had only used the stage names that were posted on Porn Wikileaks once, when registering for testing at AIM. One former porn performer we spoke to registered for an HIV test with AIM using a stage name he made up "off the top of my head" when he started in the industry eight years agoâand he never used it again. (He picked a new stage name when he appeared in his first adult video.) But the stage name he gave AIM recently appeared on Porn Wikileaks, linked to his real name. That stage name "was never used, it was never spoken anywhere else. It was written down one time and one time only and that was on the HIV form for AIM," he said. "Without a question [the leak] came from AIM." [...]
News URL
http://gawker.com/#!5787392/porn-star-hiv-test-database-leaked