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Behold the Canadians, Destroyers of Worlds
Avid Life Media is a Toronto-based company that makes millions on the sexual weakness of others. It runs three sites, Ashley Madison, Cougar Life and Established Men. The first two are for married people
that are looking to be matched up for affairs, the latter for young women who wish to be the mistress of a successful and well-heeled man.
Of course, this service is promised to be 100% safe and discreet.
Yesterday morning they were hacked and someone calling themselves “The Impact Team” is threatening to release the data of all 37 million of their customers unless ALM takes at least two of the sites down.
“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 sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails. The other websites may stay online.”
What seems to particularly irk The Impact Team is that ALM advertises that they will scrub your information from their servers for a $19 charge and doesn’t deliver.
“Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie. 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.”
Somebody’s been burned and probably has the legal bills to prove it.
It’s easy to say “Karma is a bear” (for lack of a more colorful euphemism), but in this increasingly web-based world our vulnerabilities are more than evident. Not even the unlimited resources of the federal government are able to keep prying eyes away from our personal data — and in some cases are they are actively trying to weaken the private sector’s ability to do it. (All in the name of national security, of course.)
I guess it’s just a matter of time before the great Ricochet hack, after which I’m made to take the Walk of Shame as an Outed Conservative.
Published in General
Don’t mess with Dr. An.
Another point about the AM hack that I’m surprised nobody has yet mentioned: How many people have opened an AM account for the sole purpose of finding out whether or not their spouse has an account? They’re going to be “outed as cheaters”.
What percentage would you guess this would be at? Are you trying to tell us something?
a) Greater than zero.
b) No.
a) Bold prediction.
b) No, need to tell us more.
Like any sane online-security-conscious individual’s.
The Bieber Cross. Not Canada’s highest military honour.
I thought it was the Canadiens. Where does EJ get off changing the spelling? What does he have to hide? How much of this thread is auto-biographical?
That’s only in Montreal.
Which is pronounced through the nose without the “nt” and not at all real, but more hray-ol.
Mistheocracy, I’ve got very little sympathy for anyone in that database.
Sure, a surprisingly large proportion of the people are single, but they’re signing up on a site for cheaters. They’re explicitly willing to break up someone else’s relationship to insert themselves. You can argue that the other sites allow this too, but if a single person signs up on another site they aren’t walking in with the same intention.
If a person signs up to check on their spouse… okay, in that case the relationship is going south anyway; either because they’re paranoid or because they’re not.
If I’m reading that right, I think you’re using “bricked” in the wrong sense. When you brick something that means it’s functionality has been reduced to that of a brick. I’ve got a bricked external hard drive that makes a fine paperweight, or doorstop. Making something useless for a period of hours doesn’t qualify. If the kid had truly bricked all those devices he would have made for very sad Christmases across the land. If he merely made them unavailable on Christmas Day so that the kids were forced to interact with their parents in a non-digital context, I’m less concerned.
Frankly, I’m more concerned about the swatting.