Luke 17:28-30 “Likewise as it was also in the days of Lot: They ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built” but on the day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed.
Users of the website Ashley Madison, which is designed to allow married people to cheat on their spouses, have been exposed to the world after the release of approximately 9.7 gigabytes of user data.
A group of hackers called “The Impact Team” released millions of usernames, real names and purchase information for users of Ashley Madison and a companion site, Established Men, which allows rich men to find young women.
The hackers focused on a portion of the website called “Full Delete” which for $19 has promised to scrub all user information from the site for those who no longer wished to use it.
In 2014, the “Full Delete” feature netted $1.7mm in revenue for the company that owns both websites, Avid Life Media (ALM).
“[Full Delete is] also a complete lie,” the Impact Team wrote after the hack last month. “Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.”
“…Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn’t deliver.”
The hackers then made their next threat.
“Avid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret…fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails,” the hackers wrote in a statement following the breach.
Brian Krebs, the cybersecurity reporter with the Washington Post, wrote on the newspaper’s website that he had contacted three sources who were listed in the data dump and the sources verified the information was accurate.
“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,” officials from Ashley Madison’s parent company Avid Life Media wrote in a statement.
“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,” the statement continued.
