USA-ASHLEY MADISON-CYBERSECURITY/ANALYST More Ashley Madison affair website data leaked online; analyst says "come clean"

Record ID: 143232

  • Title: USA-ASHLEY MADISON-CYBERSECURITY/ANALYST More Ashley Madison affair website data leaked online; analyst says "come clean"
  • Date: 20th August 2015
  • Summary: HONG KONG, CHINA (FILE - AUGUST 28, 2013) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF ASHLEY MADISON FOUNDER, NOEL BIDERMAN, ON ASHLEY MADISON WEBSITE VARIOUS OF BIDERMAN BEING INTERVIEWED
  • Embargoed: 4th September 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVASJF09KCTP6TTE8AJ7SJUE04B
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Emails sent by the founder of infidelity website AshleyMadison.com appear to have been exposed in a second, larger release of data stolen from its parent company, Vice Media's online technology site Motherboard reported on Thursday (August 20).
    The data dump by a group of hackers who have attacked the site appeared to include email messages linked to Noel Biderman, the site's founder and chief executive officer of its parent company Avid Life Media.
    In a message, the hackers, who call themselves the Impact Team said: "Hey Noel, you can admit it's real now."
    The release comes as the U.S. Defense Department said it was investigating the alleged use of military email accounts on the site.
    The Motherboard report said the release bore the hallmarks of Tuesday's release by hackers who call themselves the Impact Team. Reuters could not independently verify the authenticity of the data.
    The additional release will likely ratchet up the pressure on the company, which has been quiet about exactly how much and what sort of data was stolen in a breach in July.
    Avid Life did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
    The 20-gigabyte data dump reported on Thursday would be roughly double the size of the earlier one. That included personal details of millions of members of Ashley Madison, whose tagline is "Life is short. Have an affair."
    Despite the negative publicity surrounding the cyber attack, demand for Ashley Madison's services has been steady since the data breach first announced in July, said Adam Levin, CEO of data risk management solutions company IDT911 and author of "Swiped: How to Protect Yourself in a World Full of Scammers, Phishers, and Identity Thieves."
    "We've seen a lot of companies that have been breached where everyone said it was an extinction level event, and yet they rallied," he said.
    "Target recently has had a renaissance and a lot of the other companies that suffer breaches have, some companies haven't. Ashley Madison, because of the particular nature of what it does and the sensitive nature of the information that it has, may have a bigger problem. But you really don't know. Time will really tell. We heard that they took a dip in terms of people visiting, but then it started to come up again."
    The data release could have severe consequences for U.S. service members if found to be real. Several tech websites reported that more than 15,000 email addresses were government and military ones.
    The Pentagon said it was aware of reports that military email addresses were among those posted earlier in the week.
    U.S. military culture emphasizes faithfulness to family and family life, values seen as particularly important in an environment where troops often have to spend months deployed away from their spouses and children.
    "For people in the military, if you're determined to be a philanderer, you could end up being in prison for a year, dishonorably discharged, you could be the target of an extortion plot, you could also have your security clearance in jeopardy, even if you're a defense contractor, they have security clearances, that's a problem," Levin said.
    Adultery is a violation of military law, punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but it is difficult to prosecute because of the high standards of evidence required and sometimes shows up instead as conduct unbecoming an officer.
    Hackers dumped a big cache of data containing millions of email addresses for U.S. government officials, UK civil servants and high-level executives at European and North America corporations late on Tuesday, the latest cyber attack to raise concerns about Internet security and data protection.
    The hacker attack has been a big blow to Toronto-based Avid Life, which has indefinitely postponed the adultery site's IPO plans. But many professions stand to benefit from the unfolding saga, from lawyers to therapists to cyber security firms.
    The data dump began to make good on the hackers' threat last month to leak nude photos, sexual fantasies, real names and credit card information for as many as 37 million customers worldwide of Ashley Madison.
    The public embarrassment and emotional toll is likely to be enormous on unsuspecting people whose extra-marital affairs may have been exposed on the web or even whose emails were used without their knowledge to sign up for the site.
    Ashley Madison members would likely be best served by coming clean instead of waiting to see if their indiscretion is discovered, said Levin.
    Each person has his or her threshold of how much pain and worry they want to go through before they come clean on something like this. My advice is come clean, but there are pretty ugly ramifications for coming clean," he said.
    "Coming clean is maybe not a bad idea, it's probably pretty healthy idea but a lot of people may be more scared. One of the great lines that someone said when President Clinton was going through all of the things that he went through was that he was more afraid of telling Hillary than he was of telling the American people so therefore he would've rather have avoided the whole situation. A lot of people feel that way."
    It is not clear how many of the clients are legitimate - users do not have to verify their email when they sign up.
    The lists were dumped on the so-called dark web, which is only accessible using a specialized browser, but the database was being decrypted and made more widely available.
    Still, the privacy intrusion has likely given people a jolt, making them question the data they have stored on the Internet.
    The financial impact for clients will be less of a factor compared with previous, bigger breaches - Ashley Madison said on Wednesday that current or past members' full credit card numbers were not stolen and the company has not stored members' full numbers.
    For Avid Life Media, questions remained about whether more data will be released and how its business can go on while the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Canadian police investigate what the company believes was an inside job.
    Lawyers speculated whether any aggrieved members would launch legal action against the company, which claims to be the world's second-largest dating website behind Match.com, owned by IAC/InterActive Corp.
    Avid Life values itself at $1 billion and reported revenue of $115 million in 2014, up 45 percent from the preceding year.
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