Evidence of infidelities spreads online in wake of hack
A Tuesday, April 1, 2014 file photo of Noel Biderman, chief executive of Avid Life Media Inc., which operates AshleyMadison.com., posing during a photo session in Tokyo. Hackers claim to have leaked a massive database of users from Ashley Madison, a matchmaking website for cheating spouses. In a statement released Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015, a group calling itself Impact Team said the site’s owners had not bowed to their demands. “Now everyone gets to see their data,” the statement said. AP
LONDON — Husbands and wives across the world are being confronted with their partners’ extramarital affairs after a catastrophic leak at adultery website Ashley Madison spewed electronic evidence of infidelity across the Internet.
Online forums were buzzing Thursday with users claiming to have found evidence that their significant others were on the dating site. In the United States, a religious ex-reality television star made a groveling apology after a media outlet found his financial data in the dump. In Britain and Israel, parliamentarians were put on the spot after their email addresses were located in the trove. And in Australia, one woman appeared to learn — live on air — that her husband’s details were registered with the site.
Family law experts are divided on the likely offline impact of the leak, but Los Angeles-based divorce lawyer Steve Mindel predicted an uptick in business for him and his colleagues.
“We’re all saying: ‘It’s going to be Christmas in September,'” Mindel said. “Pretty soon all of this stuff is going to surface and there’s going to be a lot of filings for divorce directly as a result of this.”
Ashley Madison marketed itself as the premier venue for cheating spouses before data stolen by hackers from its parent company, Toronto-based Avid Life Media Inc, started spreading across the Internet earlier this week. Late Thursday the same hackers released a second dump of information, whose content The Associated Press was not immediately able to determine.
The material previously released, pertaining to the site’s 35 million or so registered members, has already drawn widespread attention.
Websites devoted to checking emails against the leaked data appeared to be experiencing heavy traffic. Forums such as Reddit — the user-powered news and discussion site — carried stories of anguished husbands and wives confronting their partners after finding their data among the massive dump of information.
In the U.S., the hack drew a public apology from Josh Duggar, former star of “19 Kids and Counting,” which centered on the life of the large — and apparently wholesome — Duggar family. After news and gossip site Gawker said it had found proof he paid for an account with Ashley Madison, Josh Duggar released a statement admitting he had cheated on his wife.
“I have been the biggest hypocrite ever,” the statement said. The 27-year-old Duggar’s admission comes several weeks after a molestation scandal first broke, which led to his show’s cancellation.
An AP review was the first to reveal that U.S. government workers used their federal office systems to access the site, including some with sensitive jobs in the White House, Congress and law enforcement agencies.
In Sydney, Australia, when the hosts of a morning show asked listeners to phone in if they wanted their spouse’s details run through the database, a woman called saying she was suspicious because her husband had been acting strangely since the news of the leak broke. The hosts plugged his details into a website and said they found a match.
“Are you serious? Are you freaking kidding me?” the woman asked, her voice shaking. “These websites are disgusting.” She then hung up.
The emotional punch of the Ashley Madison leak puts it in a separate category than the parade of recent data breaches, said Eduardo Ustaran, a data protection and privacy lawyer with Hogan Lovells in London.
“Passwords can be changed and credit cards replaced,” he said in an email. “But the Ashley Madison breach is different because it threatens to destroy lives and families.”
It could also threaten political careers.
Journalists are combing through the data, looking for the names of celebrities, top officials or religious leaders. Their task has been complicated by the fact that many of the profiles were tied to fake or borrowed email addresses, which users did not necessarily have to validate.
In Britain, Scottish lawmaker Michelle Thomson said an obsolete email address had been “harvested by hackers” and used to register an account with the site. A similar explanation was offered by Talab Abu Arar, a Bedouin Arab lawmaker in Israel whose parliamentary email address was found amid the dump.
“Someone wanted simply to hurt my good name … it is very annoying,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.
Like many Bedouin Arabs, Abu Arar practices polygamy and has a wife and a common-law partner. With two partners, he said, why would he need a website?
“I’m not lacking in women,” he said with a chuckle.
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