I know bunches of people who have cheated on their spouses. You do too. You know how I know that? Because bunches of people have cheated on their spouses.
I’m not a big fan of marital infidelity. You don’t have to have been reading BoWilliams.com long to know that. Most cheating stories are bad, though if there are less bad and more bad ones, surely the deliberate act of registering yourself at a dating site specifically intended for budding adulterers falls toward the more bad. Intent? Premeditation? Check. Check.
(That seems a fair distance from a single drunken uh-oh to me. You?)
It seems the lovely people at AshleyMadison.com are back in the news. I last talked about them about a year ago, when I began receiving an inordinate amount of junk email from them (or on their behalf). This time, guess what? Hackers claim they have all of AshleyMadison.com’s customer records, and unless the web site is shut down, they’ll release them. They say they have “profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails.”
AshleyMadison.com claims 37 million members.
Now it seems to me that turning them all loose at once would be incredibly chaotic. If the perpetrators only want great seats for the bloodbath, then that would be a good thought.
Let’s say AshleyMadison.com is padding its number a bit and there are really 30 million members. Feels reasonable to put half in the United States, so let’s do that too. (It’s probably more, but go with me.) So that would be 15 million American members. Now some significant number of those are unmarried people looking for married companionship—gray area, but technically not cheaters. Let’s be very generous and say there are 5 million of those.
So that gets us to 10 million married Americans who belong to AshleyMadison.com. There are about 115 million married adults in the United States.
Can you imagine nearly 9% of the married United States being outed as cheaters simultaneously?
Now if the hackers instead chose to be patient and methodical, the opportunities for blackmail here are essentially limitless. Bad guys have devised all sorts of ways to communicate and transfer money anonymously. With 10 million records to go through, you wouldn’t need much of a success rate to knock down several hundred dollars a day, would you? Maybe even thousands?
I can’t muster a lot of pity for AshleyMadison.com customers. Wow, can you imagine the gigantic pit in the stomach upon being a site user and first encountering the story yesterday?
But what are we talking about, but the systematically dishonest taking advantage of the systematically dishonest? If this isn’t textbook schadenfreude, I don’t know what is.
(I better not gloat too much. After all, there is my AshleyMadison.com customer record for me to worry about.)
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Momma always said ‘live right and you don’t have to worry out about people finding out about your secrets.’
Paula, pretty much! It must be exhausting to be a chronic sleaze. 🙂
Even if all the usernames/emails are dumped, it’s not new information if you know someone you want to specifically look up to see if they’re a member. It’s well known in the security world, after this site first made headlines, that anyone can type in a known person’s email address into the forgot password page. If it says “We sent you a reset email with a link” then you know they’re a member (and said member now knows someone’s checking up on them). If it says “account not found” then you know they aren’t.
All the user database dump would get us is a buffet menu where you can browse for folks you didn’t think of as opposed to letting you search for targeted specifics.
I haven’t tried this myself. I’m generally just to lazy and don’t care enough to go through that kind of stress.
Tahm, they claim to have real names, addresses, credit card transactions, employee correspondence…and “secret sexual fantasies.” If that’s true, it would be considerably more disruptive than usernames and passwords, yes?
I guess, to an extent. The addition of secret fantasies would be a tasty bit that can’t be gleamed from the password reset.
But I think 90% of the shock (who’s looking for an affair) from the information that can be attained from the dump can still be attained just by some crafty use of the password reset.
How many of those users are the spouses creating account to check to see if their significant other created an account …
Dave, good point. Still, striking a quarter of what I have left leaves us with 7.5 million people. If the hackers have got what they say they have, they’d be insane to just turn it all loose. They could play this shrewdly and patiently for 12 to 18 months and be set for life.