Ashley Madison Has Made Millions From ‘Full Delete’ Option Which Hackers Claim Didn’t Work

Hackers of the Ashley Madison ‘affair’ website have claimed that the company’s ‘full delete’ option which supposedly enabled users to remove all their details for a fee, wasn’t entirely effective.

The website, which specialises in matchmaking married people who wish to be unfaithful, charges members around £15 ($19) in order to delete all of their information completely.

According to The Verge, the company made $1.7M in 2014, suggesting that around 90,000 users opted for the ‘delete option’.

However, the hackers responsible claim that not all of the information was completely deleted as promised.

A statement from the Tonronto-based owners, Avid Life says: “No current or past members’ full credit card numbers were stolen from Avid Life Media. Any statements to the contrary are false. Avid Life Media has never stored members’ full credit card numbers”.

While the news that no credit card numbers have been stolen may be a relief to some members, it will do nothing to ease the nerves of those who risk having their philandering intentions exposed using other personal information.

A massive 9.7 gigabytes of stolen user data has been posted online by the hackers potentially revealing the identities of the website’s 39m users.

The data dump comes roughly a month after the initial cyber attack by hacking collective Impact Team, when the hackers threatened to expose user details unless the site’s owners shut it down for good.

The stolen data was initially posted on the ‘dark web’ - a hidden portion of the internet that is not searchable using conventional search engines.

However, the data has since been posted online as a database that can be searched by email address.

At least one famous actor and MP have already been found on the list, along with numerous .gov email addresses suggesting that numerous UK government workers have inexplicably used their work email addresses to sign up to the controversial site.

A fascinating, zoomable online map created on mapping software Carto DB shows the global distribution of all the Ashley Madison users outed in the hack, with the red areas showing showing the highest concentration.

The Ashley Madison site - which uses the tagline ‘Life is short. Have an affair.’ - does not verify email addresses, so it’s possible that someone could accidentally or deliberately register with the wrong email address.

While it’s possible that typos or common names could lead to erroneous email addresses popping up among the stolen data, this verification loophole also provides a ready-made excuse for those who have intentionally signed.

A statement from Ashley Madison reads: “This event is not an act of hacktivism, it is an act of criminality. It is an illegal action against the individual members of AshleyMadison.com, as well as any freethinking people who choose to engage in fully lawful online activities.

“The criminal, or criminals, involved in this act have appointed themselves as the moral judge, juror, and executioner, seeing fit to impose a personal notion of virtue on all of society. We will not sit idly by and allow these thieves to force their personal ideology on citizens around the world. We are continuing to fully cooperate with law enforcement to seek to hold the guilty parties accountable to the strictest measures of the law”.

While the hack and subsequent data dump is set to ruin numerous relationships as the hidden intentions of spouses are revealed, the implications for the security of personal data stored online may reach far wider.

(Image credit: Reuters, CartoDB)