Hackers dump huge data on dark website.
By Raif Karerat
Follow @ambazaarmag
A second round of user logs from adultery-enabling website Ashley Madison have been disseminated by the same team of hackers who exposed users the first time around. The question is, how many cheating Indian and Indian Americans have been outed?
“The Impact team” released another trove of documents and confidential information on Thursday to follow up on their first 9.7 gigabyte leak, according to Vice.
The data dump by hackers who have attacked the site appears to include email messages linked to Noel Biderman, founder and chief executive officer of its Toronto-based parent company Avid Life Media, reported Reuters.
In a message accompanying the release, the hackers said: “Hey Noel, you can admit it’s real now.”
Meanwhile, the Associated Press traced many of the accounts exposed by hackers back to federal workers.
They included at least two assistant U.S. attorneys; an information technology administrator in the Executive Office of the President; a division chief, an investigator and a trial attorney in the Justice Department; a government hacker at the Homeland Security Department and another DHS employee who indicated he worked on a counter-terrorism response team.
While numerous outlets previously reported 15,000 emails that were exposed could be traced back to federal addresses, according to The Hill, about 10,000 of the emails seem to originate from legitimate government and military accounts ending in .gov or .mil.
Some have even proposed the not-so-farfetched idea that foreign governments could blackmail U.S. officials with the Ashley Madison data, threatening to inform a spouse about their partner’s membership at the site.
Some gay men in Saudi Arabia whose names have been revealed, face the death penalty.
“The more information that’s out there about people in sensitive positions, the more you can fill out a complete dossier on them,” Michael McNerney, a former cybersecurity policy advisor for the secretary of Defense and a Truman National Security fellow, informed The Hill.