Nearly one million Australians risk being exposed as unfaithful partners in the hacking saga of infidelity dating site Ashley Madison.
The site, which targets users looking for sex outside of their marriages, is being blackmailed by a group calling itself The Impact Team, which has threatened to publicly release customers' profiles and credit card details.
In a statement released on Monday, The Impact Team warned ALM to remove the Ashley Madison and Established Men sites or "we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers' secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails".
It provided apparently random samples of data from about 40 million accounts, including some from other ALM sites, to prove its bona fides.
The Impact Team claimed the attack was in retaliation to claims by Ashley Madison's parent company Avid Life Media (ALM), that all customer information could be permanently erased from the site.
The hackers drew attention to a quote from ALM's chief technology Officer Trevor Stokes: "Protection of personal information" was his biggest "critical success factors", and "I would hate to see our systems hacked and/or the leak of personal information".
"Well Trevor, welcome to your worst f--king nightmare," The Impact Team said in their statement.
ALM, which also owns the dating sites Cougar Life and Established Men, have confirmed the hackers were able to access data of up to 37 million users of the site. Ashley Madison has asserted that it has about 900,000 members in Australia. A Business Insider article from last year puts the number at 910,000.
As recently as April, ALM was planning an initial public offering of shares to raise $US200 million to help with its global expansion. Christoph Kraemer, its head of international relations, said at the time that AshleyMadison.com had 36 million members in 46 countries, making it the world's second-largest paid-for Internet dating website.
Asked for advice about how Australians could protect their data from being stolen in these kinds of attacks, University of Melbourne academic Atif Ahmad said the answer was simple: "Don't do it!"
Dr Ahmad said no one could today guarantee confidentiality online.
"In the 1980s and '90s there were a lot of books about 14-year-olds hacking all sorts of places for bragging rights," he said. "Now they're not looking for challenges. They are looking for money."
He also said the highly casualised workforce and new managerial practices that often encourage workers to bring their own computers to the office only served to heighten the threat.
This seems to have been the case at Ashley Madison. ALM chief executive Noel Biderman has suggested that the culprit may have been someone who had worked at the company.
People are moving in and out of organisations," Dr Ahmad said. "Many of them are being exploited, or doing the exploiting themselves."
with Kate Aubusson
