US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said today that the Pentagon is investigating the recent leak of user data from Ashley Madison. According to The Hill, roughly 15,000 email addresses associated with the US government and military have been found in the initial document dump.


“I’m aware of it, of course it’s an issue, because conduct is very important. We expect good conduct on the part of our people,” Carter told reporters.

The Pentagon’s primary concern regarding the leak likely has to do with the blackmail of service members who may have signed up for Ashley Madison. But if you were dumb enough to use your military email for signing up, it’s possible the Pentagon already knew about it. The military keeps a close eye on how its members use the internet, not just for red flags of marital infidelity, but also credit problems and anything else that might open up people who deal in classified information to blackmail.


As one anonymous Department of Defense official told news outlet DefenseOne, “There’s a possibility we would have already found them through user activity monitoring. We monitor for certain things.”

Certain things, indeed.