Ashley Madison - 'Welcome to the first day of the rest of your internet'

http://www.businessinsider.com/pirate-bay-is-serving-an-ashley-madison-ad-next-to-the-ashely-madison-data-dump-2015-8

http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/55d45968371d2278018c0c60-1605-955/ashleymadison.png

apparently the site didn't have email verification? so anyone could use anyone else's email address for their account

makes it hard to pin any accusations on public figures

ashley madison posted this today:

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 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. We are continuing to fully cooperate with law enforcement to seek to hold the guilty parties accountable to the strictest measures of the law.

extract from washington post piece is super sobering imo

didn't lagoon write in another thread about the weird paucity of righteousness in hacking, ie things targeted at student loans say instead of just broadly aimed at big organisations. this feels like a kind of misdirected & accidentally moralistic righteous hack, sorta mirroring the gawker thing per old lunch.

apparently the site didn't have email verification? so anyone could use anyone else's email address for their account

― ciderpress, Wednesday, August 19, 2015 10:04 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

makes it hard to pin any accusations on public figures

― ciderpress

yeah, that was my initial thought as well, but i didn't realize that credit card/financial transactions were also leaked:

33 million accounts with more detailed information (names and addresses), and every credit card transaction from the last seven years, is reported to have been posted online

i don't think it would be too hard to make strong connections.

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/happened-hackers-posted-stolen-ashley-madison-data/

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. AshleyMadison.com claimed to have nearly 40 million users at the time of the breach about a month ago, all apparently in the market for clandestine hookups.

the people who grabbed all this data justify dumping it because the site is "immoral" is a really bad look, imo

definitely.

The hackers deflected responsibility for any damages or repercussions that victims of the breach and data dump may suffer.

“Find yourself in here? 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,” they wrote.

justifying, I mean

that reason is about ten times stupider than saying they did it "for the lols"

Mumsnet ;_;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33985706

people I want to judge my "morality":
- people I do business with
- people who I have moral contracts with
- people I have a direct personal relationship with

note lack of "randos on the internet" in that list

the incident, called DadSecurity

I thought the justification was that they were charging users to delete accounts and lying about having done it?

The users seem like collateral damage rather than being the focus, which makes it even more stupid in some ways.

yeah this isn't really 'hacktivism', it's just hacking, for lack of a better term

they have used a variety of justifications, all of which hold tiny amounts of water

it feels like an episode of black mirror

some other revelation needs to happen to really make this black mirror-esque

like finding out people really didn't use it for cheating but for some sort of complicated investment scheme

the ppl publishing this list are doing something much worse than the people they are trying to expose, it's prurient & self-righteous in the worst way

this will probably have an effect on the elections

write in votes for Ashley Madison

for sure, some political types are definitely ridiculous enough to have accounts on this

I mean, some have already proven themselves brazen enough to just hit on people on twitter or w/e, Ashley Madison is practically subtle in comparison to some of the shenanigans out there

i bet there were like 30-35 actual affairs conducted out of all this

Yeah, I wondered about that. A whole lotta lookers but not a whole lotta takers.

*shakes fist* where are the horney internet wives

tell me if you ever figure that one out!

is it just me or does the tone of that text file posted above read more than a little like some "men's rights" screed?

It does have the vibe of a jilted gent, refusing to be mocked or patronized! after he gets spammed for the 30th time.

https://ashley.cynic.al/

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/19/snp-mp-michelle-thomsons-data-hack-adultury-ashley-madison

adultury

grauniad strikes again

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/19/how-democrats-and-republicans-advertise-themselves-on-ashley-madison/?postshare=9621440011689864

Surprised "Intelligent.Introverted.Chivalrous.Ultralibertarian.Atheist" wasn't on an escort site instead of AM.

classic: "There were also mentions of Mitt Romney. One reads simply 'romney'. The other..."

https://www.reddit.com/r/lgbt/comments/3ebzzj/i_may_get_stoned_to_death_for_gay_sex_gay_man/

gonna see if i can never find out who AM is

You never will because it's not a person

there ya go

Prominent divorce lawyer Raoul Felder said the release is the best thing to happen to his profession since the biblical Seventh Commandment: do not commit adultery.

"I've never had anything like this before," he said.

so she was caught lip-syncing on the Simpsons. big deal.

gonna see if i can never find out who AM is

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, August 19, 2015 2:01 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You never will because it's not a person

― polyphonic, Wednesday, August 19, 2015 2:06 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://lparchive.org/I-Have-No-Mouth-and-I-Must-Scream/Update%201/img-2.gif

fuck these hackers and fuck everybody I know posting this jubilantly today.

just heard about mh's reddit post from a friend. shit like *that* is why this is fucked, that and the whole mass presumptions and internet morality police performing a service that nobody requested that will likely take down a shitload of innocent people down with the guilty.

(the post he shared, obv he didn't make it)

'Keep in mind the site is a scam with thousands of fake female profiles. See ashley madison fake profile lawsuit; 90-95% of actual users are male. Chances are your man signed up on the world’s biggest affair site, but never had one. He just tried to. If that distinction matters.'

i mean, who cares then? what's the point? is it that different from i don't know... watching porn? how many users on the website are actually married? how much actual cheating was derived from the website? Seriously I am starting to think hackers are really just bunch of 14 years olds.

you ol' romantic, van horn street

attempted illicit fucking

with female bots

http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSyG5wtPh7I5s4DEfxItvRZyB95Y-YgdYPWJvqkb7HXxxmeCbrs
I am not amused by this development.

Funny, given the male/female ratio, that my two of my three friends with registered email addresses are women.

Three friends:
1) Finance guy, European, married to a friend of mine, two kids at home. European, so permitted swinging? Who knows.
2) Lawyer, gal, adventurous online dater between two marriages (and more than between?).
3) Arty gal, adventurous dater, never married.

What's an adventurous dater? First-date BDSM?

i don't want to discount how awesome that Thunderstruck bit is
magnificent

http://boingboing.net/2015/08/26/ashley-madison-looks-like-it-w.html

An analysis of the accounts indicates that there were 20,000,000 men active on the site and 1,492 women regularly checking messages.

makes me curious about this article - http://www.gq.com/story/ashley-madison-affair-cheating-site

lol good to see short fiction getting a platform in a big mag like GQ

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/8/ashley-madison-users-are-getting-off-too-easy.html

lmao for sure man

waiting for this article to be written: "No females on Ashley Madison. Where women have affairs"

http://gizmodo.com/the-fembots-of-ashley-madison-1726670394?utm_content=buffer25590&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

On June 27, 2013, in an email thread with the subject line “how angels are made, ”Noel Biderman scolded some of his employees for failing to create a decent automated process for making angels:

I will tell you what the flaw is—simply listening to hourly employees complaints and then building an unmanageable system around their so called “creativity” block when all that needed to be done was to hire a group of language related individuals to manually build X number of profiles over the span of y month(s) and then have someone on the photo side add relevant and reliable images.

What has been created now is a bureaucratic convoluted nightmare of a process that not only takes longer, costs more money, involves more “management” and ultimately produces a worse product.

Over a year and half ago I approached the two of you to try to automate this system as I did not want to have a CSR level rep making mistakes that lead to transparency issues that they could not comprehend the impact of.

Our ability to productize this approach failed but this nightmare of a quagmire stops now. We just need to learn how to properly staff up for a project and then staff down ...

it was like the internet entrepreneur's fantasy turned into its opposite

lol so Biderman resigned AND his leaked emails revealed his own affairs and escort hookups.

http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/2459/2693/original.gif

A HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

http://consumerist.com/2016/02/02/ashley-madison-offering-profile-photo-masks-rendering-users-completely-unrecognizable-to-their-loved-ones/

A HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

http://i.imgur.com/KzB4C0O.png

THE FUCK IS THAT.

XD

"Well, first... ok? Number one - why would anyone hack it again? I mean, they already got everyone's deets the first time, right? And two - hear me out, the second thing, see... they've got this new MASK feature turned on."

http://i.imgur.com/OTuSDB0.jpg

myspace so classic

How do they still have subscribers after revealing that all the Ashleys were fake?

i'm afraid i'll be laughing all night now

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/02/four-plus-years-later-ashley-madison-hack-is-used-in-new-extortion-scam/

In the past two weeks, researchers have detected “several hundred” emails that threaten to air those intimate details to the world unless the former subscribers’ pay a hefty fee.
“I know everything about you,” one of the emails, dated January 15, says. “I even know that you ordered some … let’s call them ‘male assistance products’ online on 12/11/2018 using your account at Bank of America N,a routing# 121000358 account# [redacted] for $75 for mailing to [redacted] CA [redacted]!” The extortionist goes on to say: “If you do not act very fast your full AMadison profile and proof of it will be shared with friends, family, and online over social media—and of course your internet orders.”

...Despite the damage done to millions of users and years of unfavorable news coverage that resulted, Ashley Madison continues to operate and even thrive by some accounts. According to a 2018 report from auditors Ernst & Young, there were 472,752 new Ashley Madison accounts registered monthly that year. A report published a year later said new registrations for 2018 totaled 5.3 million and on average there were 442,449 new Ashley Madison accounts registered each month. In this post, Ashley Madison claims to have 60 million members. The site’s tagline continues to be “Life is short. Have an affair.”

remember when this happened

I could've swore this was like 2008, not six short years ago.

so many lives ruined

i was right

.
.
.
.
right?

probably not

*wonder years narration voice*

ok someone do the final episode epilogue for the celebrity "exposure" crew who was ruined by this

its really amazing that nothing came out of this

One Douche Life To Live

oh wait one thing did my older brother (who is not married) was on it lol

As the World Douches