Cyber criminals have attacked AshleyMadison.com, the website that encourages men to have affairs and has the slogan ‘Life is short. Have an affair’. Data from the site is being leaked, potentially exposing clients who have used the site for extramarital hook ups. The criminals have threatened to keep leaking the data until the site is closed down.
The message from the hackers is clear: “Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion”.
Users of the site believe that their financial information and personal details are automatically wiped from the site’s database, but the hackers, known as ‘The Impact Team’ claim to have all the information provided by clients to the Toronto based Avid Life Media, which owns AshleyMadison. The site promises discretion to its users, charging US$20 for a ‘full delete’ feature, but as many as 37 million users may be about to find out otherwise.
Alongside the published stolen data, The Impact Team published the following:
Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.
Avid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails.
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.
Our one apology is to Mark Steele (Director of Security). You did everything you could, but nothing you could have done could have stopped this.
Are these men getting their just desserts or is any type of cyber crime unacceptable?
