It’s gone from bad to worse for the infidels who have been using the Ashley Madison site to get a little side action.

First the site was hacked and the details of around 32 million users nabbed, the hackers threatening to release those details unless both Ashley Madison and Established Men (a site accused of allowing rich older men to pay for sex with younger men) were taken down.

Now as you may have guessed, these sites didn’t play ball and the result is around 9.7 GB of data being made public. Here are the hackers laying down the law:

This below from Wired explains how in depth the information shared really is:

The files appear to include account details and log-ins for some 32 million users of the social networking site, touted as the premier site for married individuals seeking partners for affairs. Seven years worth of credit card and other payment transaction details are also part of the dump, going back to 2007. The data, which amounts to millions of payment transactions, includes names, street address, email address and amount paid, but not credit card numbers; instead it includes four digits for each transaction that may be the last four digits of the credit card or simply a transaction ID unique to each charge…

The hackers anger stems from Avid Life Media’s (ALM) questionable business practices more than the morality of cheating spouses. Whilst ALM promises to delete user data from the site for a fee of $19 the hackers maintain the information is still stored on their servers. Here’s ALM’s response to the data dump:

“This event is not an act of hacktivism, it is an act of criminality. It is an illegal action against the individual members of AshleyMadison.com, as well as any freethinking people who choose to engage in fully lawful online activities,” the company said 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. We will not sit idly by and allow these thieves to force their personal ideology on citizens around the world.”

I’m pretty sure there will be some edgy spouses around the world hoping their other half doesn’t gain access to that leaked database. It will require a little more digging than simply checking the browser history, sure, but for the suspicious partner it might be worth the extra effort.

[source:wired]