Now that the "Ashley Madison" website's 38 million adulterers have been exposed, websites are springing up to enable cheaters - or their scorned - to check and see if their names and fetishes have been made public.
A month ago, a group of “hacktivists” that call themselves the Impact Team threatened Avid Life Media (ALM) with a massive leak of data belonging to millions of people who used web services ALM owned. Primary among them is the adulterist haven “Ashley Madison” which sold itself with the slogan “Life is short. Have an affair.”
Well, the Impact Team followed through with their threat and released the data. 10GB compressed - which is far beyond enormous - worth of personal information including some credit card details, emails, names, addresses, phone numbers and member profiles of the cheating site's 38 million users.
When we say member profiles, we mean that the breach includes subscribers' sexual predilections, such as "Threesome," "Being Dominant/Master," "Being Submissive/Slave," and "Bondage." Relationship statuses include "attached female seeking male," "attached male seeking female," "single male seeking female," "single female seeking male," "male seeking male," and "female seeking female.”
As small a number it may seem in comparison to the total, it should be noted that 15,000 of those e-mail addresses belong to government and military servers that use .gov and .mil top-level domains. Even UK PM Tony Blair appears to be a victim of this breach.
“Time’s up!” the hackers exclaim. “It was ALM that failed you and lied to you. Prosecute them and claim damages. Then move on with your life. Learn your lesson and make amends. Embarrassing now, but you'll get over it.”
The leak has been confirmed by Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security, who said:
“It appears legit. I asked my twitter followers for those who had created accounts. I have verified multiple users of the site, one of which was a throw-away account used only on the site. Assuming my followers aren't lying, this means the dump is confirmed.”
The hackers aren’t the only ones who are helping people weed out infidelity either. There are tools to help people discover if they or their loved ones have been outed by the breach. Wary cheaters can now visit at least two websites - here or here - should they feel the need to check to see if they were exposed.
Whatever the Impact Team's motivation, morality and truth won in this case. We’ve said it once and we will say it once more: “Cheaters never prosper.”