Hackers expose millions on adultery site

Hackers on August 19, 2015 posted personal details of millions of those registered with cheating website Ashley Madison, which claims to be the internet's leading facilitator of extramarital liaisons.

A message posted by the hackers accused Ashley Madison's owners of deceit and incompetence and said the company had refused to bow to their demands to close the site. Its owner, Toronto-based Avid Life Media Inc., said it was investigating the claim, with US and Canadian law enforcement agencies also involved in the probe. TrustedSec chief executive Dave Kennedy said the information included full names, passwords, street addresses, credit card information and "an extensive amount of internal data". Errata security chief executive Rob Graham said the information such as the user's height, weight and GPS coordinates were also leaked and that men outnumbered women on the service five-to-one.

"Unless this information becomes easily accessible and searchable, it is unlikely that anyone but the most paranoid or suspecting spouses will bother to seek out this information," New York divorce attorney Michael DiFalco said.

French leak monitoring firm CybelAngel said there were 1,200 email addresses in the data dump with the .sa suffix, suggesting users were connected to Saudi Arabia, where adultery is punishable by death. It also counted some 15,000 .gov or .mil addresses , suggesting that American sol diers, sailors and government employees had opened themselves up to possible blackmail.Using a government email to register for an adultery website may seem foolish, but CybelAngel vice-president of operations Damien Damuseau said it keeps the messages out of personal accounts "where their partner might see them."

The hackers' motives aren't entirely clear, although they have accused the firm of creating fake female profiles and of keeping users' information on file even after they paid to have it deleted. Avid Life Media accused the hackers of seeking to impose "a personal notion of virtue on all of society."

(Source: AP, London)