Ashley Madison customers are being blackmailed ever since their personal data was leaked by hackers. An unknown group or individual has been sending extortion emails demanding bitcoin for silence. The email reads:



"Unfortunately your data was leaked in the recent hacking of Ashley Madison and I now have your information. If you would like to prevent me from sharing this dirt with all of your known friends and family (and perhaps your employers too?) then you need to send exactly 1.05 bitcoins to the following BTC address..."



In a recent blog post from network security firm CloudMark, software engineer and research analyst Toshiro Nishimura investigated the matter and suggested that approximately $6,400 "may be attributable to victims paying the blackmail."



The Nishimura team noted that all the emails consistently demanded "exactly 1.05" Bitcoins from the victims, suggesting that the blockchain could be searched for transactions paying that amount to verify if such extortions were being paid.



"We found 67 suspicious transactions totalling 70.35 BTC or approximately 15814 USD within the extortion time frame of approximately 4 days paying 1.05 BTC to addresses, with no previous activity, and with 2 or fewer transaction outputs...We conservatively restricted ourselves to ordinary transactions with 2 or less outputs, thus excluding those which were less likely to be simple one-to-one payments."



Nishimura further added that although nothing could be said conclusively, they found that, "For a spammer with pre-existing infrastructure and tools, this extortion campaign could have yielded a worthwhile sum for very little effort."



He said that the next step in the analysis would be to follow the trail of Bitcoins leading to each suspicious address to check if they are linked on the blockchain to each other or any other known suspicious addresses. This in turn could "potentially help law enforcement to deanonymize and pursue the perpetrators."