WASHINGTON -— This could get embarrassing: The latest entrant in the long list of companies whose data has been stolen by hackers is the marital-infidelity website AshleyMadison.com.
The site, whose slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair,” boasts 37 million users. Avid Life Media, the Toronto-based company that owns Ashley Madison, as well as related sites such as Cougar Life, Established Men and ManCrunch, confirmed to security expert and former Washington Post cybercrime reporter Brian Krebs of KrebsOnSecurity.com on Sunday that it had been hacked.
CEO Noel Biderman said that the company was “working diligently and feverishly” to take its intellectual property down.
The hackers, who go by the name The Impact Team, have published random snippets of user accounts already, as well as company information such as server maps and employee information, Krebs says. They say they published because ALM supposedly lied to their customers about a service that could completely erase user information for $19.
“Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie,” the hacking group wrote.
“Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion,” the hackers continued. “Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn’t deliver.”
“We’re not denying this happened,” Biderman said, but added, “Like us or not, this is still a criminal act.”
He tells Krebs that the company is “on the doorstep” of figuring out who hacked them, saying it may have been someone on the inside — someone who “was not an employee but certainly had touched our technical services.”
h/t TIME
