Adultery website hacked, 37m cheaters feel the jitters

TNN

Washington, 21 Jul 2015: ’’Life is short. Have an affair,’’ goes the slogan of the website Ashley Madison, an online dating and social networking service that effectively encourages infidelity. Million of adulterers could see their affairs shorted too, not speak of experiencing danger to life and limb itself from spouses, after hackers who stole 37 million personal records from the site threatened to release it if the website and its affiliates are not shut down. 

 

According to data security analyst Brian Krebs, who first reported the hacking, a group known as The Impact Team broke into the systems of Avid Life Media (ALM), the Toronto-based firm that owns AshleyMadison as well as related hookup sites Cougar Life and Established Men, to extract sensitive internal data. In a manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team explained that its ire stemmed from alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee. 

 

According to the hackers, although the ’’full delete’’ feature that Ashley Madison advertises promises removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site, users’ purchase details — including real name and address — aren’t actually scrubbed. The company keeps the real name and address from the credit card transaction. 

 

’’Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion,’’ Krebs on Security cited the hackers as saying. ’’Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn’t deliver. We’ve got the complete set of profiles in our DB dumps, and we’ll release them soon if Ashley Madison stays online.’’ 

 

’’And with over 37 million members, mostly from the US and Canada, a significant percentage of the population is about to have a very bad day, including many rich and powerful people.’’ the hackers threatened. 

 

Noel Biderman, Ashley Madison’s CEO, confirmed the hack to Krebs, calling it ’’a criminal act.’’ He said that the company was ’’’working diligently and feverishly" to remove its customers’ data, some of which had already been leaked, from public view. 

 

Ironically, Ashley Madison had boasted to reporters and bloggers only last year that its site was ’’the last truly secure space on the Internet.’’ The latest leak comes only weeks after hackers stole and leaked online user data on millions of accounts from another hookup site called AdultFriendFinder. 

 

Ashley Madison has been courting controversy for several years now with its brazen defense of adultery. It offered to pay millions of dollars to financially broke cities to rename airports and stadiums after it, and was usually rejected. Critics said its business model was ’’built on the back of broken hearts, ruined marriages, and damaged families,’’ but the company argued that the affairs it instigated preserved many marriages.