Ashley Madison Hack: 10,000 Gov’t Officials’ Email Addresses on Leaked Ashley Madison List

[bemildred]

Stolen data from the Ashley Madison infidelity dating site includes approximately 10,000 email addresses belonging to government officials or workers with .gov addresses. The Daily Beast reviewed the files and found accounts linked to the email addresses of members of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), as well as numerous officials from the Australian and British governments. The Daily Beast, however, cannot verify the authenticity of all the accounts yet.

The data dump included 36 million email addresses for 33 million accounts, along with user names, first and last names, the last four digits of credit cards, personal IP addresses, street addresses, and phone numbers for a large number of them. In total, the hackers released 10GB of compressed data—a staggeringly large amount.

On Tuesday night, Ashley Madison’s chief technology officer, Raja Bhatia, gave an interview to tech blogger Brian Krebs claiming there’s no evidence that the data dump is the real deal—a murky stance the company has been trying to sell since the hack was revealed last month. But The Daily Beast managed to make contact with six of the names on the list who confirmed their identities.

The leak not only included user data but also internal company documents pertaining to Ashley Madison and its parent company Avid Life Media, including Ashley Madison execs’ PayPal accounts, corporate passwords, company memos, loan agreements, a list of banks (with corresponding account numbers), office seating charts, and an internal document titled “areas of concern—customer data” that outlined how ALM was worried about “data leak/theft issues” and “system integrity,” such as a “web app remote code exploit in our codebase resulting in a man-in-the-middle attack where a hacker gains access to our customer’s billing/credit card information.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/19/ashley-madison-hack-identities-of-33-million-aspiring-adulterers-released-online.html

[drm604]

1. Who the hell uses a work email address for something like this?

I would never use a work email for anything personal, even innocent things. I would think that government offices would have a policy against it. I wonder how many jobs are going to be lost over this.

[bemildred]

2. Seems naive, doesn't it? That's what gmail is for. nt

[drm604]

4. For something like this

you use gmail and a prepaid debit card (a Visa gift card, for example). Even then you're not completely protected but unless those records include an IP address you're probably protected from something like this.

[Takket]

5. You took the words right outta my mouth

[E-Z-B]

3. I'm hoping James Dobson is the next one to be revealed

And it puts an end to Focus on the Family.

[yeoman6987]

6. Too old and had a stroke

Not even sure he is in the public eye anymore.

[NBachers]

7. Sources have stated that Bobby Jindal is on the list . . .

looking for "Jiminy Cricket playtime."