Robert Siciliano discusses the Ashley Madison hack that exposed 37 million email addresses, including military and government accounts. The breach raises questions about anonymity on the dark web and the personal fallout for users whose private sexual preferences are now public.
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Back at 7:44, this story still got them talking. The FBI investigating that massive breach of a website dedicated to helping spouses cheat.
Tens of millions of email addresses belonging to Ashley Madison customers available for all to see now on the internet. Among the surprises, a number of them that seem to belong to members of the military and government. NBC's Tom Costello has more on that. Tom, good morning.
Hi guys, good morning. There's a very big caveat here. We don't know how many of the email addresses are legit. It's entirely possible that Ashley Madison customers used somebody else's email when signing up for the service, and some of these addresses are very obviously fake because Ashley Madison never verified all the addresses. But still, millions of marriages and reputations could be very much at stake this morning. 37 million. That's how many email addresses hackers may have released that allegedly belong to Ashley Madison Ashley Madison customers. Ashley Madison. The website that encourages customers to cheat on a spouse. Life is short, have an affair. In an online statement, the hackers calling themselves the Impact Team write, "Find yourself in here? It was Avid Life Media, Ashley Madison's parent company, that failed you and lied to you. Learn your lesson and make amends. Embarrassing now, but you'll get over it." Help me find a discreet lover.
Pretty kitty needs some. I like to please the one I'm with.
Wired.com's Kim Zetter has gone through the massive data dump, including customer profiles, and soon anyone could be able to search through it.
A lot of people have downloaded it, and you can probably imagine that in the next couple of days someone is going to create a searchable website for this data.
Perhaps most surprisingly, 15,000 addresses allegedly belonging to military or government employees, including domains like .mil, schools.nyc.gov, dhs.gov, state.gov, @senate.gov, though many are obviously fake, including president@whitehouse.gov. White House emails use a different domain name, eop.gov. Other leaked email addresses appear to include corporate executives, Vatican staff, members of the UN and British government, though a member of Parliament says her address was stolen and used without her knowledge. Online, a lot of angry reaction. "I hope everyone gets what's coming to them," wrote one. But also this: "Cheating is wrong, but also hacking personal personal information is wrong. Already some have asked cybersecurity pros for help.
I've had people actually confess to me that they have, you know, these various, well, fetishes, I guess, and that they're concerned that their information is going to be found and that in some cases maybe even their spouse will find out about it.
The hackers claim their mission is to shame Ashley Madison and its customers. In a statement, the Canadian parent company says, "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 company has said in the past it believes somebody who had a prior connection to the company is behind this. But the data was dumped on a part of the internet called the dark web. It is ripe with criminal activity like child porn, drugs, and stolen credit cards. It's very difficult to police because the browsing activity is anonymous and difficult to trace. So what's the next shoe to drop? It could be employers or spouses demanding answers from people whose email addresses are on the list. As many as 90% of them are thought to be men, but Ashley Madison insists it is not shutting down regardless of what people may think of it. Guys, back to you.
Tom, when you reported this story the other day, and actually Pete Williams did as well, and mentioned dark web, we all sat here and looked at each other and not even heard of this. And now we understand it's a lot bigger than anyone realized.
So yesterday I spent much of the day trying to figure out how to access the dark web, and part of the problem is if you work for a company like NBC, there are firewalls that don't let you do it. It is essentially using a special browser, and then you have to go in, and once you're using the special browser, you are being bounced around multiple servers around the world, which makes it impossible for the police to trace you, so you can then go and engage in illicit activity.
I guess we see why law enforcement has its work cut out for them with trying to track all kinds of terrible things that are happening. It's like a hacker's world out there.
