In July, AshleyMadison.com, an online cheating website, was hacked exposing its 37 million users. The data that was apparently stolen included “financial records (bank account data & salary information, the company’s user databases and other proprietary information like Avid Life Media’s (the website’s owner) properties, maps of the company’s servers and employee network information”. Interestingly, the site has seen a spike in new users registering to the service since the company was hacked. The site says it has received hundreds of thousands of new users in the past week. 87,596 of its new users in the last week were women with site rubbishing past reports that most of the users were men.
Following the hacking and subsequent data dumping, which included internal emails of the company, several websites cropped up allowing users to search their data. This This website for instance allowed users with a profile on Ashley Madison to search using their email addresses. There is even a custom Google Map that displays some of AshleyMadison.com users’ addresses registered with the website. Interestingly, some users decided to sign up to the website using their company and government websites.
These sites may be the subject of a new lawsuit that has included Amazon and Go Daddy as defendants. The two are included in the suit for their role in hosting the leaked data search sites. The sites however claim not to store any of the email or data searched by users. In addition, one of the sites lists Amazon as the re seller on Whois website data, while the other added Go Daddy as their registrar according to Inquisitr. Amazon and Go Daddy are accused of facilitating the making of the data public.
The Plaintiffs are three men who claim to have been Ashley Madison account holders since 2008 and state they gave their names and credit card information to Ashley Madison users. They are thus seeking $3 Million in losses and damages stating that they have become victims of extortionist schemes since the data went public.
