Hackers threaten to reveal Ashley Madison clients

Hackers are threatening to expose millions of Ashley Madison users in a massive data breach at the cheating website.

The company’s slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair.” The website explicitly promises discretion for ‘extramarital affairs.’

A person or group calling itself The Impact Team claims to have user databases, financial records and other proprietary information

In a manifesto, the group says they’re making the information public because of Ashley Madison’s own policies.

The Impact Team is taking issue with the profile-removal option, which is known as the ‘full delete’ and costs $19. They claim the profile is never fully removed, with names and addresses remaining in Ashley Madison’s databases.

Avid Life Media, the Toronto company that owns Ashley Madison, confirmed the hack on Sunday night.

According to Krebs on Security, which broke the news, The Impact Team has hit two other dating sites belonging to Avid Life, Cougar Life and Established Men.

The hackers want the websites taken offline.

In a statement released Monday morning, Avid Life Media said they were “mitigating” the attack.

“Following the earlier unprovoked and criminal intrusion into our system, Avid Life Media immediately engaged one of the world’s top IT security teams to take every possible step toward mitigating the attack.

Using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), our team has now successfully removed the all posts related to this incident as well as all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about our users published online. We have always had the confidentiality of our customers’ information foremost in our minds and are pleased that the provisions included in the DMCA have been effective in addressing this matter.

Our team of forensics experts and security professionals, in addition to law enforcement, are continuing to investigate this incident and we will continue to provide updates as they become available.”

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How to create a secure password:

• Use a different password for each of your accounts. Online banking, email, Pinterest, and Ashley Madison should each have a different password.
• Use a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols
• Don’t use personal information, such as a birthdays
• Don’t use common words. ‘Password’ and ‘letmein’ are not good passwords.
• Do use a pass phrase. Pc World recommends converting a favourite song lyric or movie quote into a pass phrase. For example, change “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” to “Ywtt?Ychtt!”
• Keep your passwords secure

 

Tips taken from Google and pcworld.com