Hackers Popped a Porn Site for Inflation Fetishists

A porn site for inflatable toy fetishists is down after hackers defaced it and downloaded users’ data. 

InflateVids is a tube site for people who enjoy balloons and large sculptural pool-style vinyl toys. While an inflation kink can include a fantasy of watching or experiencing physical expansion, InflateVids focuses on the balloon hobbyist variety, where people have sex with inflatable toy whales, horses, and other animals or shapes. Users can upload their own videos. 

InflateVids announced the breach in a tweet on Monday. Breach notification service HaveIBeenPwned then said it had analyzed the data. 

On Monday, in place of those whale toy humping videos ordinarily on the InflateVids site was the word THRAX spelled out in red and black ASCII lettering, and a link to download the database. 

Users’ email address, usernames, IP addresses, public profile information and password hashes were compromised in the hack, the site’s administrators wrote in a Patreon post. Like many legitimate user-generated porn sites, InflateVids required ID verification to upload, but the administrators said in the post that ID information wasn't part of the breach because they delete that information after submission.

In the Patreon post, the InflateVids admins said they don’t know how or why the hack happened. 

“I have some educated guesses where this might have happened, especially considering the website got defaced, but I haven't had the time to properly look yet,” they wrote. “There is no indication that the attacker got access to the server itself, instead just the instance of the website. Sadly that was enough to pull the database, get access to the storage access key, and delete all the files.” 

While the site is mostly dedicated to videos of people humping inflatable toys, there are also tutorials, like “how to make a round ass from two b balls” and how to blow up or deflate and fold toys. 

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Looners (the shorthand nickname for balloon fetishists) are a big category on custom porn clip sale sites, as well as on mainstream tube sites, but very few dedicated sites for inflation videos exist. The InflateVids owners explain on the Patreon page that they’re attempting to fill a need that mainstream sites don’t. “YouTube has been cracking down on more and more of these types of videos, marking them as fetish content and thus against the community guidelines,” they wrote. “A lot of videos get age-gated and aren't able to be embedded onto other websites anymore, not to mention that watching these videos require you to be logged into a YouTube account.”

Inflatable toys can cost hundreds and up to thousands of dollars and are sometimes custom made; videos of people popping them are a big part of the genre. It’s not clear whether users’ videos were deleted forever or just remain inaccessible at this time. 

“We are looking at trying to restore up to fairly recently, but it could take some time and we aren't sure what that would look like,” InflateVids said on Patreon in response to a user asking if they’d have to reupload videos.

About the author

Sam Cole is writing from the far reaches of the internet, about sexuality, the adult industry, online culture, and AI. She's the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.

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