Thousands of user emails and passwords from pornographic site YouPorn were exposed in a security breach, the Associated Press reports.

The security breach was allegedly caused by a third-party chat service, which "failed to take the appropriate precautions in securing its user data," according to Kate Miller, spokeswoman of YouPorn parent company Manwin Holding SARL. YouPorn has shut down the breached server and notified its users about the security breach.

To make matters worse, a list of user emails and accompanying passwords (in plain text) is already circulating online. The list contains some 6,400 passwords, and it's already been widely publicized, looked over and analyzed - for example, a word cloud of the most popular passwords from the site has been created by researcher Ashkan Soltani.

YouPorn is one of top 100 visited websites on the internet according to Alexa, which makes this security breach a high profile one. It's also highly embarassing for users, many of which probably do not want to be publicly associated with a pornography site.

The lesson to be learned from the incident is the usual one: do not use the same login credentials for multiple sites. Additionally, if you use services such as this one, choose an e-mail and/or login and password that cannot easily identify you.

[via AP]