Millions Exposed In Extramarital Dating Site Hack
Brian Kreb’s reports that another online dating site that caters to extramarital dating – has been hacked.
Large caches of data stolen from online cheating site AshleyMadison.com have been posted online by an individual or group that claims to have completely compromised the company’s user databases, financial records and other proprietary information. The still-unfolding leak could be quite damaging to some 37 million users of the hookup service, whose slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair.”
The data released by the hacker or hackers — which self-identify as The Impact Team — includes sensitive internal data stolen from Avid Life Media (ALM), the Toronto-based firm that owns AshleyMadison as well as related hookup sites Cougar Life and Established Men.—http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/07/online-cheating-site-ashleymadison-hacked/
It’s unclear how much of the AshleyMadison user account data has been posted online. For now, it appears the hackers have published a relatively small percentage of AshleyMadison user account data and are planning to publish more for each day the company stays online.
“Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion,” the hackers continued. “Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn’t deliver. We’ve got the complete set of profiles in our DB dumps, and we’ll release them soon if Ashley Madison stays online. And with over 37 million members, mostly from the US and Canada, a significant percentage of the population is about to have a very bad day, including many rich and powerful people.”—http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/07/online-cheating-site-ashleymadison-hacked/
What To Do About It | KnowBe4.com
I suggest that again you take immediate preventive action. It only takes one second for a worried end-user (or admin) to click on a link in an email and expose the network to attackers. I recommend you send something like this to your friends, family and end-users. Feel free to edit.
“A few months ago, news broke that the Adult Friend Finder website was hacked. Now it’s AshleyMadison, their biggest competitor. These sites are for people who want to cheat on their spouse. The site has 37 million registered users, and these records are now out in the open, exposing highly sensitive personal information. Internet criminals are going to exploit this in many ways, sending spam, phishing and possibly blackmail messages, using social engineering tactics to make people click on links or open infected attachments. Be on the lookout for threatening messages like this that slip through and delete them immediately.”
As you can see, stepping your users through effective security awareness training is an absolute must these days. For KnowBe4 customers, we have a new Social Networking template that lures people into clicking on a link to the “haveibeenpwned” website to see if their personal sensitive information was hacked. The subject of the template is “RE: Pictures from your Ashley Madison account were leaked”
