WASHINGTON: Hackers have released stolen information from some 33 million users of an adult website, Ashley Madison, which facilitates cheating and extra-marital affairs.

Experts and technical media outlets – such as the Wired magazine and Kerbs On Security – have confirmed that the leak looks genuine.

“There are millions of Ashley Madison users who wish it weren’t so, but there is every indication this dump is the real deal,” wrote Kerbs.

The leaked data includes personal details such as last four digits of the users’ credit cards and their names.

Ashley Madison is a Canadian online dating service, which introduces itself as an “online personals & dating destination for casual encounters, married dating, discreet encounters and extra-marital affairs”.

The website was launched in 2001 and its name was created from two popular female names, Ashley and Madison.

The site has more than 124 million visits per month and an internet monitoring service, Similar Web, ranks it 18 on its list of “top 50 sites in the world for adult”.

The Wired described the leak as the “dark web”, which also includes email addresses and phone numbers of millions of people who were registered on the dating site.

Kerbs reported that the data was hacked at least 30 days before it was leaked on Tuesday evening. The hackers were identified as the “Impact Team” who allegedly tried to shut the site permanently. The group threatened to release customers’ compromising pictures and conversations if the site wasn’t closed.

Ashley Madison’s website is known for its slogan, “Life is short. Have an affair.” It helps connect people seeking to have an extra-marital relationship and is owned by a company, Avid Life Media.

“We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM (Avid Life Media) and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data,” said the “Impact Team” in a statement accompanying the leak.

“I’m looking for someone who isn’t happy at home or just bored and looking for some excitement,” said one user in the data, Wired reported, while noting some 15,000 users in the data included government or military email addresses.

Avid Life Media, based in Toronto, Canada, said the release of data was an illegal action against the members of the website.

The leak, however, does not affect passwords that remain encrypted via a modern encryption standard called bcrypt. But it is possible to “reverse engineer” those passwords.

Besides Canada, the company also has offices in the US, UK, Japan, Israel and Brazil.

Published in Dawn, August 20th, 2015

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