In July this year, infidelity website AshleyMadison.com was hacked and the sensitive information that were stolen were threatened to be released to the public. This week, Wired reports that what AshleyMadison executives have feared has finally happened. A data dump of about 9.7 GB was posted on Tuesday — albeit on the dark Web — which include sensitive information like personal details of the individuals on the site, credit card transactions, and the like.
The dump happened after the timeline the hackers gave Avid Life Media — owner of AshleyMadison and like-minded site EstablishedMen — expired. According to the article, the hackers demanded that Avid Life Media take down both these sites, but the company didn't acquiesce to the hackers' demands; hence the data leak on the dark Web.
The dark Web, or Dark Net, is a part of the Internet that is not as readily accessible and available like the everyday-version of the Web millions of users are on.
In a report from The Daily Dot, the leak appears to be authentic. In an updated part of the article as of Aug. 19, Ars Technica reported that the legitimacy of the leak was confirmed by "multiple cyber-security researchers."
A massive number of people have reportedly confirmed the leak of their information to Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security. Brian Krebs of KrebsonSecurity also thinks that the documents and data included in the dump are not to be doubted.
According to his blog, Krebs thinks that a lot of users are in for rocky times. These were also confirmed by the matching credit card numbers; the PayPal acocunts and passwords that match; as well as the first and last names of the users who confirmed that their information are part of the data breach.
