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Question of the Week #9: Hackers Leak Ashley Madison Data on the Dark Web

La Femme Fatale

The Queen
Moderator
A month after breaching the web servers of AshleyMadison.com, hackers have released data revealing the names, email addresses, home addresses and sexual desires of the adultery-oriented website’s entire user base. On Tuesday, as web forums buzzed alternately with panic and schadenfreude-fuelled attempts to expose the desires of the rich and powerful, the National Post’s Tristin Hopper took a look at the implications of such an unprecedented data leak.

HOW BIG IS THE BREACH?

It’s impossible to tell how many of the 33 million accounts are real, but that’s roughly the population of Canada, where Ashley Madison is headquartered. In technical terms, the file amounts to 9.7 gigabytes of data. That’s enough to store the complete works of Shakespeare 2,000 times over.

WHO HAS BEEN EXPOSED?

The massive data dump is still being analyzed, and for most casual Internet users, it remains locked in dense, hard-to-read data files. But early reads of the information have turned up the following:

  • 15,000 accounts used email addresses ending in .mil or .gov, indicating a member of the U.S. military or U.S. government employee;
  • 273,320 email addresses ending in “.ca,” indicating a Canada-based domain;
  • 163 accounts used emails ending in @forces.gc.ca, the domain used by the Canadian military;
  • Hundreds of email addresses are associated with Canadian federal departments and agencies, including justice, public works, the Canada Revenue Agency and the RCMP.
  • At least one Canadian MP was registered by name. Several email addresses attached to the Senate were registered although not under any sitting senators’ names.
  • There were also municipal government email addresses, including 78 in Toronto, 41 in Ottawa and 32 in Calgary. Dozens of university email addresses are also included.
  • In the U.K., 92 Ministry of Defence email addresses showed up, as well as 1,716 from universities and colleges;
  • In a testament to the unreliability of the data,[email protected] was among the email addresses. Ashley Madison does not verify email addresses, allowing users to sign up with whatever email they please.
ARE THEY ALL CHEATERS?

About 70% of AshleyMadison’s users are male, which should provide some clue about the likelihood of successfully finding a mistress. Not to mention the fact that, of the female users, many are “scammers and webcam girls and sugar babies,” as one anonymous writer told Vice this year. And Ashley Madison doesn’t verify email addresses, so anybody can open an account with make up an email, be it [email protected] or[email protected]. While real-life affairs were certainly sparked on AshleyMadison.com, it’s likely that most of the 33 million users treated the site as a kind of supercharged version of online pornography. As one worried user posted to Reddit on Tuesday, “I didn’t cheat on anyone, just got drunk, logged into the site, bought some credits and played around with it, and then forgot all about it for nearly three years until now.”

WHO DID IT?

A group of hackers calling themselves “Impact Team” has claimed responsibility. As critics have noted, this hack is different from the typical cyber attack. It wasn’t exposing government secrets, like Wikileaks. It didn’t steal credit card data for profit, like the 2013 Target cyberattack. Instead, the whole purpose of this exercise was the somewhat puritanical goal of shaming “cheating dirt bags,” as the Impact Team calls the site’s users. As Ashley Madison itself put it in a statement, “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.”

THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE HACK

Divorce
Raoul Felder, a prominent U.S. divorce lawyer, told Reuters on Tuesday that the release is the best thing to happen to his profession since the 7th Amendment, which guarantees Americans’ right to a jury trial.

Financial security
The hack didn’t just expose names and sexual desires, it also released reams of data about addresses, phone numbers and email addresses. That’s all enterprising criminals would need to orchestrate a devastating identity theft against a stranger — that is, unless they opted to try blackmail instead.

Personal security
With 33 million users, many Ashley Madison clients now live in countries where adultery and philandering come with severe penalties. One widely circulated Reddit post from a gay man in Saudi Arabia said he used Ashley Madison while studying in the United States — and was now facing torture and possible execution if the data was made public. Although the message cannot be verified, it is within the realm of possibility.

False identity
Scottish MP Michelle Thomson was among the first public figures to have her email address found in the data breach. But in a statement, Thomson called the discovery a surprise and said her email had been hijacked by a stranger. True or false, hundreds of celebrities or authority figures could soon be facing false accusations as a result of joke accounts or users who got a sexual thrill out of impersonating them on Ashley Madison.

Lawsuits
Lawyers in Missouri and Toronto have already begun sussing out plaintiffs for a class-action lawsuit against Ashley Madison. According to a statement of claim filed in the U.S. last month, the website “failed to adequately analyze its computer systems for vulnerabilities that could expose cardholder data.”

Death
Rash behaviour is common when marital fidelity is breached, and with so many relationships and families at stake, simple math seems to point to at least a few fatal tragedies stemming from the hack. Security analyst Brian Krebs broke the initial story of the data breach, and on Tuesday he told Britain’s The Telegraph, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw people taking their lives because of this.”

Nobody is safe
Until now, the worst thing most Internet users could expect was to lose their credit card number in a data breach. But the Ashley Madison hack deals a devastating blow to the 21st century promise that the online world could be a realm of freedom and anonymity. For anybody who hoped to keep their religion, political beliefs, sexual orientation and even movie preferences private, the world will never be the same.


Questions to Consider:

Where the 'hackivists' right to leak this information?
Do the users of this site deserved to be exposed?
What punishments should the hackers face, if caught?
How would you react if someone you knew was on the website?

 

Cheer

Kamen Rider
Where the 'hackivists' right to leak this information?
The only people who have the rights to share said information are the owners of the information themselves.
Do the users of this site deserved to be exposed?

Well according to the implications of the hack I'd say no they don't.
What punishments should the hackers face, if caught?

Hackers (Cybercriminals) are no different than Bank Robber, Cat Burglar or a any other type of criminals. And they should be punished according to the crime they committed from spending time in prison to Death.
How would you react if someone you knew was on the website?

I'd be devastated, Crushed and furious.
 

La Femme Fatale

The Queen
Moderator
Just to clarify - you don't have to answer those specific questions, everyone is more than welcome to post whatever thoughts they may have on this story. Those are just suggestions if you can't think of anything to say. :)
 

Venomous Oddball

Also Known as Maddy
They were right to leak all that information. They deserve to be exposed. It's unfair to their spouses, and they need to know who they really are. About 33 million lowlife a-holes used that site, and they deserve to be punished.
 

KevinStriker

"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it?"
All three parties are at fault in this situation.

1) Team Impact, the hackers, leaked private information from a server and made it public, that's an invasion of privacy, and nobody wants to have their information leaked or doxxed.

2) The thirty million plus members on this website, who are cheating on their significant others, breaking every vow you can think of. Some of them are even known to brag about having multiple partners on the forums. Who knows if the sex is safe or not, or what kind of horrible venereal diseases they're tracking back into their house?

3) The site Ashley Madison itself, the host of these 30 million adulterers and cheaters, requiring a sh!t ton of personal information to join their website and charging one lump sum of cash to your credit card when you have a moment of guilt, or get cold feet and want to delete your account. And even then, they don't delete your personal information, your name, address, credit card number, your phone number. It just sits on their server practically waiting for an opportunity to get to use it again.


I have no horse in this race, I think they're all despicable and deserve your contempt.
 

La Femme Fatale

The Queen
Moderator
I think that the individuals who hacked into the site and leaked the information online are even more repulsive than the people who were actually on the site in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, if you're not happy in your marriage, you should get out of it or at least have a dialogue with your spouse and come to an arrangement you both can be content with. I'm by no means absolving the users of responsibility as they're clearly in the wrong as well. However, I have no respect for the pricks who hacked the website because someone else's relationship is none of your goddamn business. Period. The users' behaviour was wrong, but the hacker's behaviour was downright criminal.

You don't know what the dynamic of someone's relationship is. You don't know if they have an open relationship. You don't know if they were drunk and signed up three years ago and forgot about it, as apparently has already been the case. You don't know if there's been some indiscretion in the past that the couple has already worked through - and now you've opened old wounds and let everyone else inside. These hackers have made themselves everyone's judge.

I would be devastated if I found out my husband, if and when I get married, was on a website such as this. But you know what's even worse? If everyone else knew my husband was cheating on me. I would be horrified if my kid gets bullied because it became public knowledge that Daddy cheated on Mommy. You're not just humiliating the men on the website - you're humiliating the women they are married to and you're humiliating the children in the relationship. But these assholes don't really care about them, do they?
 

Spikeyroxas

Pencil Artist
Premium
Adultery is immoral not illegal.
But I still considor it an awful scumbag act, so in a way I do feel like these people deserve this.
Although no one deserves their privacy disturbed...
Who knows, maybe this leak has helped more people than ruined
 

La Femme Fatale

The Queen
Moderator
Apparently I'm the only one that finds the people on the site disgusting? :p
I made it quite clear that what the men on the site were doing was wrong. My point is that it is not up to the hackers to make that call. Someone else's relationship is NOT their business. The only people whose business it was is the husbands' and the wives. NOW it's everyone's. Who are they to take the moral high ground when what they're doing is not only wrong, but 100% criminal?
 

Venomous Oddball

Also Known as Maddy
I made it quite clear that what the men on the site were doing was wrong. My point is that it is not up to the hackers to make that call. Someone else's relationship is NOT their business. The only people whose business it is is the husbands' and the wives. Who are they to take the moral high ground when what they're doing is not only wrong, but 100% criminal?

You're right. It just makes me really mad that some idiots would actually use that site, though it is none of those hackers' business.

Adultery is immoral not illegal.
But I still considor it an awful scumbag act, so in a way I do feel like these people deserve this.
Although no one deserves their privacy disturbed...
Who knows, maybe this leak has helped more people than ruined

Honestly I don't care about it being legal, to me it's worse than a lot of illegal things, but that's just my opinion.
 

La Femme Fatale

The Queen
Moderator
You're right. It just makes me really mad that some idiots would actually use that site, though it is none of those hackers' business.
Of course. I'm just more concerned for the spouses. In short time that information is going to readily accessible - and now everyone's going to know their business.

If it was just the cheaters who received the consequences, I might be more forgiving. But these hackers are humiliating everyone involved and they don't care about anyone or anything apart from their ridiculous moral crusade.
 

Venomous Oddball

Also Known as Maddy
Of course. I'm just more concerned for the spouses. In short time that information is going to readily accessible - and now everyone's going to know their business.

If it was just the cheaters who received the consequences, I might be more forgiving. But these hackers are humiliating everyone involved and they don't care about anyone or anything than their ridiculous moral crusade.

Yeah, it would be pretty humiliating, especially for all those politicians.
 

Cheer

Kamen Rider
They were right to leak all that information. They deserve to be exposed. It's unfair to their spouses, and they need to know who they really are. About 33 million lowlife a-holes used that site, and they deserve to be punished.

Well i do agree that what that the purpose of that site is immoral. but just because its immoral doesn't mean hacking that site and expose the information is the moral thing to do. I mean Before computers, people used to visit brothels to satisfy their Sexual needs. Being geographically isolated from others forced them to suppress their socially unacceptable desires. Today, the internet connects people with the same deviant tendencies, and once they come together, they normalize their behavior and encourage each other.

@KevinStriker What you said especially this part
they don't delete your personal information.

Raise a really good question. What if the purpose of the attack was to gain attention for the site?
 

La Femme Fatale

The Queen
Moderator
How PC of you. ;)

Well, according to data, men outnumber women on the website 6-1. So no, it's not all men but it's not exactly close to 50:50 like most other dating websites are, either.

Anyway, I didn't mean to pin it on the men, KevinStriker. It was my fault that I may have misspoke a few times here and I apologize. My critique, though, has been overwhelmingly against the hackers, not the users.
 

KevinStriker

"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it?"
Being called politically correct is somewhere between being my kryptonite and my berserk button.
Just saying, it's a bit of a misnomer to say only men had accounts on Ashley Madison, especially when one of the more noteworthy accounts is for a lady in The House of Commons (whose name escapes me).
 

La Femme Fatale

The Queen
Moderator
But I didn't say 'only men had accounts on Ashley Madison'. I generally referred to men because I was just casually posting my thoughts and wasn't weighing every word - I already apologized for that. I relate most to the spouses in this story - the people who've been cheated on because I am a woman who has indeed been cheated on. Those are the lens through which I see this story, but I am by no means trying to say that the only users are men. As I've said already, I misspoke.

All the same, it is a website does have a greater male clientele compared to other dating websites - that can't be denied. And another one of the other more noteworthy accounts is Barack Obama's as well - it doesn't mean that he personally signed up for it.
 

Cheer

Kamen Rider
I know this may sound way off topic. but do you guys think that this attack is somehow connected to the TV Series CSI:Cyber.
 

cheezMcNASTY

Entertain me.
Premium
No, they were not right to leak the information. Yes, infidelity and some corners of the internet can appear unsavory. I personally find myself looking down on people who have accounts, despite the fact that I'd like to remain neutral. Bad life decisions or not, they are victims here.

To be clear: vigilante justice is not justice. Learning to hack does not give you the right to mess with people's lives. Maybe some of the account owners are rotten individuals who "needed" their secret activities brought to light. That doesn't give anyone the right to force realization on their loved ones. Would you rather find out something unsavory about a loved one from a renegade group of hackers or by your own discernment? I choose the latter, personally. It shouldn't be done especially like this and especially not with some users residing in countries that will literally kill them if they are found out.

The hackers deserve the full force of the law. They may claim their action was just, and you can argue that it was, but that doesn't change anything. A) They, as ordinary citizens same as you or I, do NOT have the right to meddle in the lives of thousands of strangers. B) Even if they claim it was just, I personally suspect that the act was only done for fun. That was the real logic behind every 4chan raid and DDoS attack (it was only ever justified in project chanology) and I don't tend to believe that the desire to do these things could possibly vary domain to basement to domain. In other words, it's no different.

My reaction to finding out someone in my life was using Ashley Madison:
SCENARIO A
"You do realize what you're doing is the epitome of stupid, right?"
"Yes."
"Good. Because I'm going to say I told you so when this bites you in the ass."
"Ok."

SCENARIO B
"You do realize what you're doing is the epitome of stupid, right?"
"No."
"It's the epitome of stupid."
"Ok."
"I'm going to be saying I told you so if you don't get your **** together and stop."
"Ok."

And what they do after that is quite honestly on them. Unless I'm really good friends with both them and their partner, I stay the philanthropy out of that ****, yo. It's not even a bro code thing. Really. It's about maintaining my own sanity. People get paid comfortably to be in the middle of this stuff. They're called marriage councilors, and I'd rather work at McDonald's than be one of them.
 
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Airaku

Stray Jedi
This whole thing raises a lot of red flags... a lot of those celebrity e-mails are not real and/or not actually ran by those respective people. This whole thing is so fishy to the point it raises the bull**** meter to all new heights. Half of the celebrities or government related people on there are too vast to be even considered as likely. They also don't use e-mails that are so obvious that they would be spammed by fans. They also wouldn't use professional e-mails for this but rather their personal e-mails to avoid getting caught. I think it's safe to say that most of these are troll accounts. Yet alone to even consider that all these people have time to waste on a site like this.

Is there actual physical evidence that this is real and not a fabricated troll? The amount of names on this site that reek of bull**** is quite stinky. I for one, question the whole authenticity of this leak. Sure it could be real, but I doubt half of those accounts have any credibility to them. That is just my take on this development.
 
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