Hackers have finally released the data captured last month when the infidelity site Ashley Madison, which facilitates affairs between married men and women, suffered a security breach. The group, calling themselves Impact Team, has published nearly 10Gb of the stolen data on the Dark Web.
Ashley Madison Website
About 37 million users have been affected worldwide, mostly from the US but many from the UK. Email addresses have been linked to the White House, NASA, the Vatican and the United Nations. In the UK, thousands of local and national civil servants, Ministry of Defence employees, and university professors have been implicated. One of those is the married MP for Edinburgh West, Michelle Thomson, who has said that she is the victim of a malicious campaign.
Avid Life Media, owners of the infidelity site, confirmed in an email to Reuters that at least some of the data was legitimate, although spokesman Paul Keable emphasised that credit card details had never been stored on their servers.
In a statement, Avid Life Media contended that this was an act of criminality rather than one of "hacktivism": "The criminal, or criminals, involved in this act have appointed themselves as the moral judge, juror, and executioner, seeing fit to impose a personal notion of virtue on all of society. We will not sit idly by and allow these thieves to force their personal ideology on citizens around the world."