As we’ve mentioned before, notorious cheating website Ashley Madison is extremely screwed. If you still somehow believe that Ashley Madison will somehow come out of its massive hacking crisis unscathed, then you’ll be sobered by two new developments in the story.
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The first development is entirely predictable: Lawsuits from angry users have started rolling in. Reuters reports that “Ashley Madison and its parent company have been sued in federal court in California by a man who claims that the companies failed to adequately protect clients’ personal and financial information from theft, saying he suffered emotional distress.” We’re sure this will be the first of many, many lawsuits against the website.
The second revelation is potentially even more damaging: Krebs on Security has looked through some leaked emails from Avid Life execs and has found that they discussed potentially hacking into rival adult dating website Nerve.com and stealing their user information. You really cannot make this stuff up.
“They did a very lousy job building their platform. I got their entire user base, Ashley Madison CTO Raja Bhatia told Avid Life CEO Noel Biderman in one email. “Also, I can turn any non paying user into a paying user, vice versa, compose messages between users, check unread stats, etc.”
As noted by Motherboard, Biderman replied to these revelations by saying, “Holy moly..I would take the emails,” although Bhatia declined to do so.
In all, it’s been a terrible week-plus for Ashley Madison and we can’t imagine it getting better anytime soon, if ever.
