According to a report by Krebs on Security done on July 15th, an online cheating website, AshleyMadison.com has been backed where its 37 million users are in trouble if this data leaks.
The website promotes adultery where its slogan is “Life is short, have an affair”. The data that was apparently stolen include “financial records (bank account data & salary information, the company’s user databases and other proprietary information like Avid Life Media’s properties, maps of the company’s servers and employee network information”.
The Impact Team, the alleged hackers were complaining about the full delete feature of Ashley Madison where for $19, it promises to complete erase one’s information on the site, which the hackers say it wasn’t actually scrubbed. They issued a threat where they’ll release all records of the customer’s data if the holding company, Avid Life Media, does not take down the site.
Avid Life Media released a press statement today where it says they “were recently made aware of an attempt by an unauthorized party to gain access to their systems” and immediately launched a “thorough investigation” to determine the “origin, nature and scope” of the incident. The company continued to iterate that they were able to secure their sites and close any loopholes that were there & are working with law enforcement agencies to investigate this act.
This sort of act is a nightmare for the head of security for a social media website. As more people register for services online which require more personal data, hackers have taken advantage of this by blackmailing people & these companies by getting hold of the database.
Presently and in the future, we’ll be forced to either desist from adding personal data on social media or not joining social media sites that require more demographic data than usual. Also, from this case, the idea that people pay for their data to be scrubbed off the site and it is not fully deleted online shows a grim future where anything you delete online probably has not been fully deleted & it is lurking somewhere in the social media expanse.
Source: Krebs on Security
