Match.com says hackers are after its data

In the past 10 years, a major company has been hacked every seven weeks on average. Photo / iStock

Opinion

Match Group, the corporate parent of Tinder, OkCupid and Match.com, is planning to go public - which honestly won't have much impact on the 59 million people looking for love on its sites.

What could impact those people is a massive breach of sensitive personal data, a la Ashley Madison. And in documents filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday, Match admits that it could suffer the same sort of incursion.

"We are frequently under attack by perpetrators of random or targeted malicious technology-related events, such as cyber attacks, computer viruses, worms or other destructive or disruptive software or distributed denial of service attacks," the company writes. "While we have invested heavily in the protection of our systems ... there can be no assurance that our efforts will prevent significant breaches in our systems or other such events from occurring."

The filings go on to say that it isn't just Match's systems that are at risk of attack - but also the systems of outside, third-party vendors that store user's personal data on their own servers. If hackers went after these companies, the filings acknowledge, they could potentially expose the personal data, payment information and site history of millions of users.

On a hook-up app like Tinder, that record of past site use could basically amount to a personal sexual history. Match also owns a number of niche dating sites - including BB People Meet and Little People Meet - that could be embarrassing to some users, if their user rolls leaked.

Admittedly, none of this is breaking news: We live in a world where, increasingly, the constant risk of cyberattack is just the cost of doing business. In the past 10 years, a major company has been hacked every seven weeks, on average.

Still: It serves as a powerful reminder of exactly how precarious your private data is, even when you entrust it to a large or seemingly invulnerable company. No company is invulnerable anymore, Match's filings make clear.

Just ask Ashley Madison and the Impact Team.