Ashley Madison, an online dating website for cheaters, gets hacked
Ashley Madison, an online dating website that specifically targets people looking to have an affair, has been hacked by a group that calls itself Impact Team. A cache of data has been released by the Impact Team, including user profiles, company financial records, and "other proprietary information." The company's CEO, Noel Bilderman, confirmed with KrebsOnSecurity that they had been hacked, but did not speak about the extent of the breach.
The Impact Team claims to have a "complete set of profiles" from the Ashley Madison user database, though so far it appears to only have released a small number of them. The hackers seem to have taken umbrage at both the concept of the site—the site's slogan is "Life is short. Have an affair."—and also the site's "full delete" feature. Ashley Madison charges users $19 (£12) to completely erase their profile, but the hackers claim that the users' details aren't actually purged from the database. We actually wrote an in-depth piece on "full delete" back in 2014; at the time, we called it "not totally dishonest, but not totally honest either."
