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Ashley Madison user data dumped online
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Cheating website AshleyMadison hacked

AshleyMadison is a great example of entrepreneurial spirit and further proof that you can make money off anything, even people who cheat on their significant others.

The “dating” site exclusively caters to married users interested in cheating on their partners and claims to have almost forty million members. Although free to use, the site offers a service called “Full Delete” that promises to forget everything about you (supposedly making it easier if your poor, cheated-on partner gets too snoopy) for only $19 (R235).

What could go wrong?

A person or group going by the name “The Impact Team” has claimed to have broken into the databases of Avid Life Media (ALM, AshleyMadison’s parent company), stealing information including users’ profile details, ALM’s salary information and members’ financial records.

You may now be wondering how and why those financial records are floating around, and the answer, according to The Impact Team, is that ALM’s Full Delete service was a lie.

“Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm(sic) in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie,” the group said, “Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised.”

The Impact Team have issued a set of demands; they want ALM to  permanently shut down Ashley Madison and its sister site “Established Men”, or they will release what they have and leave those involved to whatever firestorm comes their way.

ALM has confirmed the hack, noting that they have since secured their databases and are working with outside security experts as well as law enforcement agencies. They also believe that the intrusion came from someone who had legitimate access to the site:

“It was definitely a person here that was not an employee but certainly had touched our technical services.”

Whenever hacks like this happen we will usually urge you to change your password, maybe set up two-step identification to protect yourself, but in this instance, if you have anything to confess to your significant other, we’d advise you to come clean. After all, imagine the trouble you’d get into if your partner found out that you’d been cheating on them on the Internet?

[Source – Krebs on Security]

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