Ashley Madison is in full damage control mode right now.
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AshleyMadison.com, a website that helps facilitate extramarital affairs, was recently attacked by hackers, who then released the email addresses of millions of the site’s registered users.
The credit-card information of U.S. government workers, some with sensitive jobs in the White House, Congress and the Justice Department, was also revealed in the data breach.
Ayesha Vardag, who has represented tycoons, heirs and royalty, said judges should not be swayed by emotional partners discovering their wife or husband was a member of the infidelity website whose slogan is “life’s too short – have an affair”.
Matthew Brothers-McGrew with Interhack, a cyber security company, says hacking happens everyday and the problem is two-fold.
Hackers posted everything from personal and financial data to romantic interests. People signing up for the service could use someone else’s email address or even a bogus one. Neither ever returned. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to draw attention to his connection to the site.
In a statement issued in response to the release of the data, Binskin said there was no evidence Australian-based systems or networks had been compromised.
So have 679 unique users with a psu.edu email address, the second-most of any college or university that uses a.edu address.
Last year, Ashley Madison named the top neighbourhoods in Vancouver for cheaters.
Same for the Houston fire department, where one of the employees allegedly worked.
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“Our motivation for doing this is mainly just the fun of creating a tool which people on the Internet find useful”, Black said in an email. Employees are barred from using government computers to access “inappropriate sites” including those that are “obscene, hateful, harmful, malicious, hostile, threatening, abusive, vulgar, defamatory, profane, or racially, sexually, or ethnically objectionable”. Avid Life released a statement calling the hackers criminals. “You take a little bit of personal information say a phone number or email address, run that in google and you can connect the dots to a huge profile of who you are as a person”.
