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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
Can we be surprised? Canada, after all, is the land that brought us the Harlequin Romance.
In other news, 2015 was the best year for divorce lawyers ever.
Science fiction stories occasionally propose a vision of the future in which the advance of some technologies negates the use of others. For example, advances in military satellites or EMP warfare minimize the viability of aerial vehicles, thereby removing air superiority as a battlefield factor. Progress leads to regress.
Hackers, supported by various technological and social changes, might one day be the “advancement” that effectively destroys the internet. If ever more people practice hacking for an ever wider variety of reasons, with increasing competition and feuding between them, hacking might become common enough and impactful enough to convince most people that online opportunities involve more risk than they are worth.
Fate forfend!
Best news I’ve heard in a long time.
Sandy – It’s easy to fall for the schadenfreude. But I suppose it doesn’t make these people any worse than divorce lawyers. They’re both predators of misery and weakness.
It amazes me the way people think. Someone got the idea of setting themselves up as an electronic wingman for lowlifes. I don’t know if I should applaud or just shudder.
I’ve got stuff to say about this, so gather round, good people. 1. congrats for the post!
2. The acronym of the hacker group is TIT? Okie-dokie!
3. Finally, the tech industry has disrupted the prostitution industry & instead of being grateful, people are complaining? For shame!
4. I’m glad to see the website for COUGARS passes muster with these hackers.
5. This has got to be the only risk of a public shaming for adultery ever since Mr. Clinton did the dirty work of demystifying the office, or whatever kids are calling it these days-
How is this post not called Ongoing disruption of prostitution possibly in flagrante! or something like that?
EJ, You’re right, of course, but sometimes Schadenfreude is the only Freude I’ve got.
Also, here’s a really fun piece from Bloomberg-something or other about the guy who just got hacked, & after having successfully moved up from helping ball players juggle their wives & mistresses–how about knives?–to helping adultery become an industry… Modern America is getting more American with every news cycle, it sometimes seems-
I guess these guys didn’t have the cutting edge security and tech of a porn site.
When operating in a moral grey (or not so grey) area you’re supposed to be very (forgive the pun) hardcore about how you handle security and your user data. These businesses know full well that they are prime targets due to moral outrage, and it is absolutely in their interest to go the extra mile for their users’ privacy and data security.
Looks like ALM brought a knife to a nuke fight in the information security world and lost, unsurprisingly.
Data is valuable. Data from someone with something to hide and a lot to lose is more valuable. It’s only a matter of time before someone tries to steal it.
That, and big hacks like this aren’t quite as hard as you might think. All they really need is a good social engineering vector combined with a little human weakness and some predictable weak passwords, and a lot of patience and perseverance. Every system is designed to be accessed, and usually the best way is right through the front door.
But why anyone wouldn’t the user just use a Visa gift card they purchased with cash under a fake name with a burner email address to register for the site? Boggles the mind.
It’s really true that people want to be caught.
Jordan – Burner addresses? Gift cards? How does your mind work?
It’s only a matter of time before we experience the most personally damaging hack ever. Obamacare has both your health and IRS records in one neat and tidy dbase.
Ok. Again from the Bloomberg piece–the woman who wrote it interviewed the wife of this panderer-pimp guy. Quoth:
The key is to recant and sell out other conservatives you know to the inquisitors.
Gotta be able to plan a heist to prevent one. That’s basically what these data breaches are. Heists, but with computers and data, instead of with banks and cash.
& that’s Frank talk-
Titus – Your link is bad.
Like a guy in Network Security :)
To put in perspective what a threat hacking will be as it becomes more common:
A year or two ago, a teenager brought down major services by Sony and Microsoft (Playstation Network and Xbox Live) so thousands of gaming consoles were “bricked” on Christmas morning via a denial-of-service attack (overwhelming servers). He was prosecuted in Finland for hacking over 50,000 devices. That’s just one kid. He also called SWAT teams on a few American families.
For all that, he received 2 years probation.
All that power and a small price to pay. How many rebels-without-a-clue do you think might join the fun under circumstances like that?
Thanks, I fixed it.
Someone got burned, apparently.
But not Cougar Life? Okay, so this is an army of disgruntled Cougars (truly a new development in hacker(fem)dom, or else the hackers are still really hoping to score. Breathe deeply:
Burned by TIT!
American kids calling SWAT on each other is one of the most endearing things about the young generation, wouldn’t you say? It’s just rehearsing, really. Glad to see it’s gone global-
In a perverse way SWATing perfectly illustrates the problem with police militarization. Just as huge hacks demonstrate the problem with storing vast quantities of valuable data in one easily accessible place.
All it takes to get a SWAT team deployed is a phone call from some person? Really? Ok, let’s push that button until they take it away!
We don’t even let people pull fire alarms without a key anymore in most places. Why let them call a SWAT team?
I loathe internet vandals and Ashley Madison. A pox on both their houses!
Which in this case would be the information being released and then the hackers being arrested. I admit to having mixed feelings on this.
The bottom line, as always, is don’t do something in the (metaphorical) dark of night you wouldn’t do in the light of day. Stoicism: it’s not just for dead Romans.
Well, I think a lot of dead people are quite stoic about it all-
Yeah, I see changes coming here. Unfortunately, not the de-militarization of the police.
The knock on your door is coming Soto.
This is funny. I’m curious what will happen from the threat to publish.
I’m curious how many people setup an account, but never followed through from there. One suspects their spouses won’t be terribly receptive to that claim.