In wake of the hacking of the extra-marital dating website Ashley Madison, two people are reported to have committed suicide, a Texas police officer being one of them, reports said Tuesday.
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Initially just the first names of users were posted online, but last week the hackers released all user data and even customers that had paid the site $19 to have their information deleted found their details released. “Among the data compromised and downloaded were profiles of individuals who executed the option to scrub their user profiles and all associated data and paid $19 to Defendants to do so, yet Defendants failed to actually scrub the data”, according to the complaint. The hackers referred to themselves as the Impact Team.
“The social impact behind this leak, we are talking about families, we’re talking about children, we’re talking about their wives”.
More than 30 million email addresses and some credit card data were released as a result of the hack last month.
“Police wouldn’t provide any details about the suspected suicides or where they occurred”, Dan Karpenchuk reports from Toronto for our Newscast desk. Also, several users have become victims of blackmail.
Toronto police revealed today that the fallout has been far from entertaining.
“Your actions are illegal and will not be tolerated”.
A representative of the US Department of Homeland Security was also at the news conference.
The Toronto police along with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Ontario Provincial Police, US Homeland Security and the American FBI are investigating the hack, dubbing the probe “Project Unicorn”. Evans says that is not possible.
“Given that the company is based in Canada, and considering the global scope of the incident, our office will be investigating jointly with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, and in cooperation with other worldwide counterparts”, spokeswoman Valerie Lawton said in an email. “We’re looking at bringing in top security investigators from around the world to assist”.
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The hackers who took responsibility for the break-in had accused the website’s owners of deceit and incompetence, and said the company refused to bow to their demands to close the site.
