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User names, passwords, home addresses and email addresses of over 6 million users of ClixSense have been exposed after hackers hit the ‘click for cash’ website. To make matters worse, the passwords were stored in plaintext.
Plaintext passwords, usernames, e-mail addresses, and a wealth of other personal information has been published who created accounts with ClixSense.
From recent news, hackers exposed over six million ClixSense user’s passwords online. ClixSense is a company, which delivers offers for online surveys. You can also earn commission by referring to other people and joining them. This is an advertisement promoting company always looking for people with high potential to view ads. Basically, the money is earned by an affiliate network owned by click sense. Also, this company is associated with one more pay-per-click network, which is all about advertisements.
When a visitor clicks on the advertisement the company will earn a small amount of money which is eventually turned into tons of money, when the massive amount of users visit the site and view ads. So the earned money is divided and some amount of it is given to the users, who help in promoting ads. From recent news, this website stated that over 6,626,048 members of the company earned nearly $20 million after delivering 3.5 billion page views in the time of last 9 years.
Basically, the process of earning is quite simple. The user gets $3 for 500 views on an ad. Which makes the user earn less than a cent per single view, yet if the user has the potential to get more views then the income will be outstanding.
From recent news, it is confirmed that the servers of this website were hacked. This company holds the record of over 6.6m members personal details and passwords . But the thing is there were already pre-cracked passwords, so the hacker didn’t have to put much effort in breaking into servers and stealing the details.
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When the company denied about the security breach news, the hacker started to put the details of accounts online to mock them. The reason was to expose the company’s false claims, that there hasn’t been any data breach. The stolen data was posted on Pastebin by angry hackers, but those details were deleted in hours from Pastebin. Check out the statement of hackers which was posted on their own pastebins post below.
“HUGE new leak! from the clixsense.com site: ~databases including ‘users’ with 6,606,008 plaintext pass, username, emails, address, security answer, ssn, dob. ~emails business + personal (more than 70k emails sent+received) ~source code for site (complete)”.
Later the company published an official update to the users about the hack saying “Members we want to keep you informed on what is happening with our recent hack. It has come to our attention that this hacker did get access to our database server for a short period of time. He was able to gain access to this not directly but instead through an old server we were no longer using that had a connection to our database server. (This server has since been terminated)”.
The company also stated that “He was able to copy most if not all of our user’s table, he ran some SQL code that changed the names on accounts to “hacked account” and deleted many forum posts. He also set user balances to $0.00.”
“We were able to restore the user balances, forum, and many account names. Some of you were asked to fill out your name again as we did not want to restore this from our backup due to the amount of time it would have taken to get back online.”
The only way to prevent your accounts and personal details is, never keep same passwords on different websites. It doesn’t matter how strong your password is if it is hacked from any of the websites, then there is a chance that you might lose other accounts from other websites too. Because that is what hackers do.
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Terry Ts 
Rudhra Nandu