Lovelorn Guardianistas are being bombarded with sexually explicit spam after their email addresses were exposed on the paper’s Soulmates dating site. Creepily, details from specific user’s profiles have been included alongside generic smut in the spam, causing subscribers to spill their almond lattes in fear. GNM has confirmed at least 17 users have been in touch to report the leak. One said:

“I basically had been receiving spam… directly referencing information that could only have come from the Soulmates database… It’s all information that I was happy to put online at one point anyway, but when it’s used outside of context like that it does feel a lot more creepy.”

The leak was first reported to The Guardian by an IT worker last November. They only replied confirming the leak last month, six months after being told. The newspaper reports heavily on data leaks by firms and in the public sector. It reported its own leak only after the story was broken by the BBC…