Ashley Madison, the aspiring IPO and popular hookup site for married people on the prowl, has been hacked. Even more alarming, the hackers are allegedly demanding some sort of payoff or else they ll release the stolen data, including real names of users and even their secret sexual fantasies.
With more than 37 million users on its site, Ashley Madison has one heck of a PR challenge this week, as Reuters reported. Hackers have threatened to release nude photos and sexual fantasies of the site s clients unless it is shut down, blog KrebsOnSecurity reported:
The data released by the hacker or hackers — which self-identify as — includes sensitive internal data stolen from (ALM), the Toronto-based firm that owns AshleyMadison as well as related hookup sites and .
Reached by KrebsOnSecurity late Sunday evening, confirmed the hack, and said the company was working diligently and feverishly to take down ALM s intellectual property. Indeed, in the short span of 30 minutes between that brief interview and the publication of this story, several of the Impact Team s Web links were no longer responding.
Biderman defended his company even as he tried to deal with fallout from the embarrassing hack:
Like us or not, he said, this is still a criminal act.
According to blog reports, the thieves not only scarfed up personal data on users of Ashley Madison and its sister property, which Reuters described as sugar-daddy site Established Men, but also hacked their way into the company s servers as well as employee network account information, company bank account data and salary information.
For some reason, however, the hackers did not go after Madison s other site, CougarLife, whose logo is Meet Divorcees, Single Moms and Sexy Singles looking for a young Stud!
Credit: Color illustration by Rick Nease, Detroit Free Press 2005
