It was 9 o’clock on a Sunday night last July when a journalist called Brian Krebs came upon the scoop of his life. The 42-year-old was at home in Virginia at the time, and wearing pyjamas. For years Krebs had written a popular blog about internet security, analysing thefts of consumer data from big companies around the world, Tesco, Adobe, Domino’s Pizza among them. Now Krebs, as his weekend came to an end, was being tipped off about a more sensational breach. An anonymous informant had emailed him a list of links, directing him to caches of data that had been stolen from servers at a Canadian firm called Avid Life Media (ALM). Krebs vaguely knew of ALM. For years it had run a notorious, widely publicised web service called Ashley Madison, a dating site founded in 2008 with the explicit intention of helping married people have affairs with each other. “Life is short. Have an affair” was the slogan Ashley Madison used.

At the time Krebs received his tip-off, Ashley Madison claimed to have an international membership of 37.6 million, all of them assured that their use of this service would be “anonymous”, “100% discreet”. Only now Krebs was looking at the real names and the real credit-card numbers of Ashley Madison members. He was looking at street addresses and postcodes. Among documents in the leaked cache, Krebs found a list of telephone numbers for senior executives at ALM and Ashley Madison. He even found the personal mobile number of the CEO, a Canadian called Noel Biderman.

Some people found they could be identified by their height, weight, and erotic desires

“How you doing?” Krebs asked Biderman when he dialled and got through – still not sure, until this moment, that he was on to a legitimate story.

Biderman said: “You can probably guess.”

‘Life is short. Have an affair’: former Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman. Photograph: Jon Enoch/Eyevine

Then the CEO of Ashley Madison began the slow, careful work of begging Krebs not to publish anything about the most appallingly intimate internet leak of the modern age.

Only a few hours later, in the west of England, a contentedly married man we’ll call Michael woke up and went through his usual Monday-morning routine. Coffee. Email. A skim of the news online. Already Krebs’s story about a hack of servers at Ashley Madison had been picked up by prominent media agencies. The story was a lead item on every news page Michael browsed. Infidelity site hacked, he read; a group calling itself the Impact Team claiming responsibility and threatening to release a full database of Ashley Madison customers, present and past, inside a month. More than 30 million people in more than 40 countries affected.

Though in the days to come the number of active users of Ashley Madison’s service would be disputed – was that figure of 37.6 million for real? – Michael could say for sure there were many authentic adulterers who used the site because he was one of them. “I’d taken some elementary precautions,” Michael told me recently, explaining that he’d registered on Ashley Madison with a secret email address and chosen a username by which he couldn’t be personally identified. He had uploaded a photograph. He was experienced enough with adultery websites – Ashley Madison and a British equivalent called Illicit Encounters – to know that “if you don’t put a photo up you won’t get many responses”. But the picture he chose was small and he was wearing sunglasses in it. “Deniable,” Michael said.

Whenever he visited the site he was careful. If he wanted to log on to Ashley Madison to speak to women he would only do so on a work laptop he kept in his office at home. Michael had six internet browsers installed on the laptop, and one of these browsers could only be loaded via external hard drive – this was the browser he used to arrange affairs. So Michael was “irritated and surprised” to realise, that Monday morning, that his elaborate precautions had been pointless. He tried to work out ways in which he would be exposed if the hackers went through with their threat to release Ashley Madison’s customer database.

Getting in on the act: moral crusaders, operating with impunity, began to shame and squeeze the exposed. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

Subscriptions to the site were arranged so that women could use the service for free while men paid a monthly fee – this, in theory, to encourage an even balance in its membership. Michael had joined Ashley Madison after seeing it written about in a newspaper. He recalled getting a deal as a new signee and being charged something like £20 for his first month. He paid using his credit card. The profile name and email address he’d chosen were no threat, the photograph deniable – “but your credit card,” Michael realised, “is your credit card.” At this time there would have been a lot of men (even conservative estimates put the number of paid- up Ashley Madison subscribers at the time well into the millions) thinking: your credit card is your credit card.

Michael followed it all from his home computer as the story evolved, through July and into August, into an enormous, consistently strange, consistently ghastly global calamity.

On 18 August, Ashley Madison’s entire customer database was indeed put online. In the subsequent panic, rewards for information about the hackers were offered. Police in Toronto (the city where ALM was based) vowed to find the culprits. Meanwhile politicians, priests, military members, civil servants, celebrities – these and hundreds of other public figures were found among the listed membership. Millions more, formerly anonymous, suddenly had their private details sprayed out on to the internet. It varied according to an individual’s caution when signing up to the site, and to their luck, and to their gender (the men in general more exposed because of Ashley Madison’s requirement they pay by credit card), but after the leak some people found they could be identified not only by their names and their addresses but also by their height, their weight, even their erotic preferences.

Moral crusaders, operating with impunity, began to shame and squeeze the exposed. In Alabama editors at a newspaper decided to print in its pages all the names of people from the region who appeared on Ashley Madison’s database. After some high-profile resignations all around North America, people wondered if there might not be a risk of more tragic repercussions. Brian Krebs, with some prescience, wrote a blog advising sensitivity: “There’s a very real chance that people are going to overreact,” he wrote. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw people taking their lives because of this.”

A small number of suicides were reported, a priest in Louisiana among them. Speaking to the media after his death, the priest’s wife said he’d found out his name was among those on the list before he killed himself. She said she would have forgiven her husband, and that God would have too. “God’s grace in the midst of shame is the centre of the story for us, not the hack. My husband knew that grace, but somehow forgot that it was his when he took his own life.”

During the early weeks of the crisis ALM, the company behind Ashley Madison, stopped responding in any sort of adequate way to calls and emails from its terrified customers. Countless marriages were at risk, people teetered on appalling decisions, and meanwhile ALM put out brisk press releases, one announcing the departure of CEO Noel Biderman. It made superficial adjustments to the front of its website, at some point deciding to remove the graphic that described Ashley Madison as “100% discreet”.

‘I was basically a therapist for them’: Australian journalist Kristen Brown, who spoke to about 200 of those affected. Photograph: courtesy Kristen V Brown

So the masses sent spinning by the leak could not turn to ALM for advice. Most could not easily turn to their partners. Someone had to fill this enormous absence, hear grievances. Troy Hunt, a mild-mannered technology consultant from Sydney, had not expected it would be him.

As the crisis developed he found that dozens and then hundreds of people, caught up in the event, were looking to him for help and for counsel. Hunt, who is in his late 30s, explained what happened. His expertise is internet security; he teaches courses in it. As a side project, since 2013, he has run a free web service, HaveIBeenPwned.com, that allows concerned citizens of the internet to enter their email address, go through a simple process of verification, and then learn whether their personal information has ever been stolen or otherwise exposed in a data breach. When hackers pinched data from servers at Tesco, at Adobe, at Domino’s Pizza, Hunt trawled through the data that leaked and updated his site so that people could quickly find out if they were affected. After the Ashley Madison leak he did the same.

Only this time, Hunt recalled, desperate and difficult and extremely personal messages began arriving in his inbox almost immediately. Mostly it was men who emailed – paying customers of Ashley Madison who mistakenly believed that Hunt, having sifted through the leaked data, might be able to help them. Could he somehow scrub their credit cards from the list? Hunt described the tone of these emails as fearful, illogical, “emotionally distraught”. About a hundred emails a day arrived in that early period, Hunt recalls. Considered together they form a bleak and fascinating historical document: a clear view into the hivemind of those caught up in the leak, caught out.

People confessed to Hunt their reasons for subscribing to Ashley Madison in the first place: “I joined Ashley Madison one night bored, honestly… Curiosity… Drunken evening…” They volunteered to him what they’d done, or nearly done, or hadn’t done at all. They described what it was like to learn about the leak: “The worst night of my life… Sheer fear… Sick and foolish… I can’t sleep or eat, and on top of that I am trying to hide that something is wrong from my wife…” They pleaded with Hunt (who could do nothing for them). They apologised to him (a stranger). They wondered if they should admit everything to the people who mattered to them. And they wondered what that might cost. “Tell your wife and kids you love them tonight,” said one email. “I shall do the same, as I really don’t know if I will have many more chances to do so.”

Some of those who got in touch, Hunt told me, mentioned suicide. He didn’t know what to do. He was a computer consultant. He sent back the numbers of telephone helplines.

Who was behind the hack? Who was the Impact Team that claimed responsibility?

Troy Hunt often wondered about that. He knew a lot about data theft at big corporations, what it tended to look like. Hunt thought this episode seemed “out of character” with many such hacks he’d seen. The theft of such a large amount of data usually suggested to Hunt that somebody employed by the company (or someone who had physical access to its servers) was the culprit. But then, he reasoned, the subsequent leaks had been so careful, so deliberate. “They came out and said: ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ Then radio silence. And then a month later: ‘Here’s all the data.’” It was sinister, Hunt thought, militaristic even.

Then there was the jarring strand of moralising in the messages the Impact Team did put out. “Learn your lesson and make amends” was the group’s advice to any of Ashley Madison’s users left in pieces by their work. Not the obvious behaviour, Hunt suggested, of a revenge-minded staffer who only wanted to hurt his or her employer.

Brian Krebs made efforts to understand the hackers, too. He’d never been able to figure out who first tipped him off, but he wondered at one point if he’d found a promising lead. In a detailed blog, published in late August, Krebs followed a trail of clues to a Twitter user who seemed to have suspicious early knowledge of the leak. “I wasn’t saying they did it,” Krebs told me, “I was just saying that maybe this was [a line of investigation] that deserved more attention.” He didn’t know if police forces investigating the case ever followed up on his lead. The Toronto force, to date, has announced no arrests. (When I asked, recently, if there had been any developments their press department did not reply.)

Krebs told me: “Whoever’s responsible – no doubt they know that there are now lots of people wanting to put a bullet in their head. If it were me, if I was going to do something like this, I would make pretty darn sure that nobody could trace it back to me.” At least in public, the Impact Team has not been heard from again.

What motivated the hackers, then? In the initial ransom note the Impact Team suggested that unseemly business practices at ALM – for instance a policy of charging users to delete their accounts on Ashley Madison and then continuing to store departing users’ personal information on internal servers – had provoked the hackers’ ire and justified its attack. But the mass release of private data, to make a point about the maltreatment of private data, cannot have seemed to anyone a very coherent reason for doing all this.



To try to better understand the thinking of the Impact Team I spoke to hackers who said they were not involved with the Ashley Madison attack but had kept a close eye on it. The general assumption, in this community, seemed to be that attacking a firm such as Avid Life Media (a bit shouty, a bit sleazy) was fair game. Few felt the mass release of millions of people’s personal information – they called it “doxing” – was ideal hacker etiquette though. “Not sure I would have doxed 20 million people at the same time,” one said. Even so they felt the saga would teach the world a useful lesson. “Anyone doing anything online,” I was told, “should assume it isn’t secure.”

One hacker I spoke to said he’d spent hours and hours digging through the Ashley Madison data after the leak, going out of his way to draw attention to his most salacious findings. Speaking to me by email and in private chatrooms, he asked that I call him AMLolz, for “Ashley Madison laughs”. We discussed some of the findings he’d made and subsequently publicised, through an AMLolz Twitter feed and an AMLolz website. He noted with some pride that in one of his deep searches he’d come across emails that suggested members of Ashley Madison’s staff were themselves having extramarital affairs. He had posted screenshots of incriminating personal messages, and several magazines and newspapers had picked up on his findings and run stories.

AMLolz might not have been involved in the Ashley Madison hack, but he was certainly involved in giving it an impactful afterlife. I asked him what motivated him. Disapproval? Revenge? “Because it was very humorous,” he said eventually. “And very interesting. No mission statement, just looking for lols.”

AMLolz used the term “peripheral damage” more than once in conversation, neatly encompassing, in those words, all the sleepless unfaithful and their tortured other halves, the newly unemployed, the dead, their doubly grieving widows. I asked AMLolz what he would tell one of these “peripherally damaged” if he were to meet them in person.

He replied: “It would depend what they had to say to me first. [Smiley face.] That being said, something along the lines of: ‘Own your actions. Don’t lie to yourself, or anyone else…’ It’s not good. [Thoughtful face.]”

In the west of England, Michael could hardly disagree with this. Even as he sat in his home office, reading the developing news about Ashley Madison and wondering if his wife was doing the same, he was well aware of his own culpability. He didn’t think he had anyone else to blame but himself. Who was he really going to blame? Ashley Madison? “I think it would probably be a little naive of me to expect high standards from a company that was promoting itself as a meeting point for people looking for adulterous affairs. It’s a bit like borrowing money off your drug dealer and expecting him to pay it back.” Michael simply accepted what was going on and watched, with a numb fascination, as the crisis rolled on.

In August, the private detective industry reported, cheerfully, an uptick in business. Lawyers steered high-publicity legal actions against Ashley Madison – at least three plaintiffs in America wanted to sue – as well as seeing through quieter divorce claims. In Australia a DJ decided to tell a woman live on air that her husband was on the database. Members and former members began to be sent anonymous extortion letters. Michael received several. Pay us in seven days, he was threatened in one email, “or you know what will happen… You can inform authorities but they can’t help you. We are porfessionals [sic].” Michael was unnerved by the emails but ignored them. The world, in these small increments, got shabbier.

Like Troy Hunt in Australia, Kristen Brown, in California, found herself operating as a sort of on-the-go counsellor during these strange months. For Brown, a 29-year-old journalist, it began when she started interviewing victims of the Ashley Madison leak for the website Fusion.net. Interviewees kept wanting to talk, though, long after she’d published – a lot of these people, Brown guessed, left without anyone else they could speak to frankly. “I was basically functioning as a therapist for them. They were crushed by what happened.” Brown guessed she’d spoken to about 200 of those affected by the hack over the past six months.

To an unusual degree, Brown thought, a tone of moral judgment skewed the commentary and discussion around the Ashley Madison affair. “It’s a gut reaction, to pass a moral judgement,” she said. “Because nobody likes the idea of being cheated on themselves. You don’t want to find your own partner on Ashley Madison. But spending hours and hours on the phone with these people, it became so clear to me how frigging complicated relationships are.”

‘Maybe we need privacy disasters like this to help us wake up’: Brian Krebs, the cybercrime journalist who broke the Ashley Madison story in July 2015. Photograph: Daniel Rosenbaum/New York Times/Redux/Eyevine

Brown continued: “We all have this idea of the site as completely salacious, right? Cheating men cheating on their unassuming wives. And I did speak to those men. But then I spoke to others who’d, say, been with their wife since they were 19 – they loved their wives but there were problems, there were kids, they’d stopped sleeping together. They had good partnerships, their lives worked, they didn’t want to upend everything. They just weren’t fulfilled or satisfied romantically. Some people were on the site with the permission of their spouses. I talked to one woman who was afraid to leave her husband, and being on Ashley Madison was her way of working out what to do. Some people I spoke to were single and didn’t want attachment and using Ashley Madison was just a way. People’s reasons were complex. They were real.”

This, more or less, had always been Michael’s reasoning for cheating. His situation was complex, and real. He told me he had been unfaithful to his wife “from after we first got married”, conducting a string of one-off or months- or years-long affairs for almost 30 years. “As life partners, my wife and I fit really well. We are very, very good friends – that describes us. But I know there’s a missing dimension to our relationship.”

Ashley Madison was a way to try to account for that missing dimension.

And not always, said Michael, a particularly satisfying way. He wasn’t even sure that every woman he spoke to during his time on the site was genuine. Sometimes, when conversation had a flavour of “classic soft porn”, he said, he wondered if his correspondents were employees of the company, reading from scripts. (The likely truth, as suggested by internal documentation made available in the leak, was stranger still. Coders at Ashley Madison had created a network of fake, flirtatious chatbots to converse with men like Michael, teasing them into maintaining their subscriptions on the site. It was for this reason that commentators began to doubt whether Ashley Madison had as many subscribers as it advertised; Avid Life Media, ever since the leak, has always claimed to have a healthy and even growing userbase.)

Michael had met someone real through Ashley Madison. Like him she was in a stable companionable marriage, only one that lacked a certain dimension. She lived in the north of England. She had children. She and Michael shared tastes in books and spoke a lot on the phone. Sometimes they discussed their partners and their respective marriages, other times they steered from the subject. There was a sexual element to the affair, Michael said, but they never slept together. It was a relationship that was precious to him.

“If you’re going to chat a woman up in a bar, or at a work conference, or wherever,” Michael told me, “then: ‘Hello, I’m married’ is not a good opening line. Whereas if you’re going on to a website like Ashley Madison – they know. It’s a bit ridiculous to talk about honesty in terms of these relationships. But they actually start with honesty. Because you’re not pretending to be something you’re not.”

Ashley Madison was a way of having a “safe affair”, he said. Safe in the sense that he didn’t think it likely he’d be found out by his wife (he had his special browser, his secret email address). Also safe in the sense that he didn’t think anyone would get hurt.Since the leak Michael had not used Ashley Madison again nor spoken to the woman in the north. His wife, as of February 2016, had not found out about his affairs.

The hack of Ashley Madison was historic – the first leak of the online era to expose to mass view not passwords, not pictures, not diplomatic gossip, not military secrets, but something weirder, deeper, less tangible. This was a leak of desires.

“I think that history’s probably littered with examples of madams whose little black book went walking, you know what I mean?” said Brian Krebs. “But this was massive, en masse, on the internet. Who knows? Maybe we need privacy disasters like this to help us wake up.”

Kristen Brown thought it was important to take away a different instruction from the saga. That marriage is not one thing, and that the millions of users of Ashley Madison very likely had millions of different reasons for being on there. “There’s a vibe between two people that can’t be quantified. How to say what the right path is for any one pair? Relationships are fucking weird. And they get weirder the longer they go on.”

In London recently I met with Troy Hunt. He’d flown in from Australia to teach a corporate course on internet security. We had lunch between morning and afternoon sessions in his classroom in Canary Wharf. While we ate Hunt showed me his phone – another email had just come in from someone requesting his help. Six months had gone by since the leak; the flow of desperate messages had slowed but not stopped.

Hunt responded to this email the way he always did now, sending back a prewritten response that included a list of answers to frequently asked questions about the hack. Also that list of hotline numbers.

When we’d finished eating his teaching resumed. Two dozen people filed into the room with their laptops and sat quietly while Hunt lectured them about cyber security. He’d worked a contemporary lesson into his speech, and projecting an image of a now-infamous website on to a screen behind him, he said to the class: “Put up your hand if any of you have an account with Ashley Madison.”

A nervous laugh went around the room. Nobody put up their hand.