Ashley Madison, the premiere dating website for married people looking to cheat on their spouse, experienced a major data-breach this weekend, and the hackers threaten release the private information for all 37 million of its users unless the website shuts itself down.
A group of hackers going by “The Impact Team” took the user information for all 40 million members on the Avid Life Media (ALM) network, which also includes Cougar Life and Established Men, according to Krebs on Security. The hackers have already dumped the bank account numbers and salaries of ALM’s employees onto the web, along with samples of user data selected at random.
The hackers threaten to release the complete cache of user data for Ashley Madison and Established Men—“secret sexual fantasies,” credit card numbers, and names and addresses—unless ALM agrees to shut down the two websites.
