Oh dear. There’s about to be a spike in America’s divorce rate. Ars Technica brings us word that the Impact Team, which previously hacked into the database of infamous cheating website Ashley Madison, has now posted user information for its tens of millions of members online. And this hack is a lot more than just users’ names and email addresses — it also includes “PayPal accounts used by Ashley Madison executives, Windows domain credentials for employees, and a large number of proprietary internal documents.” Oh dear.
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In total, researchers so far estimate that 33 million accounts have had their information posted online, including their names, addresses and phone numbers. Roughly 15,000 emails ending in either “.gov” or “.mil” have been found, which means things are about to get very uncomfortable for many officials in both the government and the military.
The Impact Team said last month that it hacked into Ashley Madison to expose its “complete lie” to customers who paid money to use the Full Delete option on their profiles. The cheating website claims that you can pay a fee of $19 for the “removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site,” but the Impact Team notes that because users pay with their credit cards. this means that their names and addresses are not removed from the site’s database.
The Impact Team had threatened to leak out all the information it stole unless Ashley Madison parent company Avid Life Media shut down the website. The company called the hackers’ bluff and now it’s paying a very steep price.
