Robert Siciliano analyzes the Ashley Madison hack by the Impact Team. The group threatened to release users' personal data and alleged the site kept paid accounts even after deletion. The breach raised questions about privacy, data retention, and hacktivism.
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Nervous online daters who've been looking for love in all the wrong places.
That's right. Ashley Madison, the dating site for people already in relationships and marriages, says it's been hacked. And as Baruch Shemtov shows us, the hackers are threatening to splash the cheaters' personal information all over the web.
Over the past year, the internet has played victim to several significant hacks, and now the most recent promises to be particularly scandalous, with hackers gaining access to Ashley Madison, a website facilitating affairs between married adults. On the website's homepage, a promise of, quote, "discreet encounters" Well, they may not be that discreet for long.
Wow! That's ridiculous!
They shouldn't be having affairs to begin with. That's shocking. This is AshleyMadison.com. Its motto: "Life is short, have an affair." And thanks to its reported membership base in excess of 37 million users, the site says that it brought in $115 million last year. Now, an alleged hacker group identifying as the Impact Team has reportedly accessed the site's customer information and is now threatening to release the the most personal of data, including names, addresses, and even personal fantasies, if Ashley Madison's owner does not shutter the site. The group also alleges that Ashley Madison held on to user information after people paid a fee to have their profile permanently deleted, a service that the Impact Team says yielded the site $1.7 million in revenue last year.
Privacy at this point has become quite an illusion.— and to many is even considered dead.
Identity theft expert Robert Siciliano notes the increased occurrence of data breaches.
Hacking and criminal hacking has actually become a part of popular culture, somewhat of a pastime for those that understand this type of technology.
Now, of course, these hackers were armed with a mission, and Siciliano even called the breach a form of, quote, hacktivism. This story is just getting started, and we'll stay on it for you as the fate of Ashley Madison's millions of members becomes clear. Reporting from the Upper East Side, I'm Brian Baruch Shemtov, Fox 5 News.
Woo! All right, well, we'll see you at 10.
All right, here's Christina Park now with a look at what's coming up at 6.
