Top data security analyst Brian Krebs has warned that people could take their lives after their personal details were exposed in a hack of infidelity website Ashley Madison.

“We have to be very cautious and I think sensitive to this,” Krebs, who broke the initial story, said. “There’s a very real chance that people are going to overreact. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw people taking their lives because of this, and obviously piling on with ridicule and trying to out people is not gonna help the situation.”

Details of Ashley Madison’s 37 million users were released on to the web on Wednesday by The Impact Team, the organization that claimed responsibility for the theft 30 days ago and demanded that the site shut down by today.



The cache of information reveals the personal details – email addresses, names (or pseudonyms), and very specific sexual proclivities – of some 37 million users the site has attracted over 14 years, and it’s not just available to download via suspicious websites, it’s easily searchable.

On social news site Reddit, one user claimed he was a gay man now living in Saudi Arabia who had used the service under his own name to meet men in the US. He titled his post: “I May Get Stoned to Death for Gay Sex (Gay Man from Saudi Arabia Who Used Ashley Madison for Hookups.)”

“I am from a country where homosexuality carries the death penalty,” he wrote. “I BEG you all to spread this message. Perhaps the hackers will take notice of it, and then, I can tell them to (at the very least) exercise discretion in their information dump (i.e. leave the single gay arab guy out of it). As of now, I plan on leaving the Kingdom and never returning once I have the $ for a plane ticket. Though I have no place to go, no real friends, and no job.”

Krebs, who posted about the hack’s outcome today and has revealed details of other major hacks including the massive data breach at Target, said the danger from this particular hack had to do not just with the nature of the information but with public shaming culture.

Krebs said he thought there was, however, one aspect of the situation that seemed absurd to him: “If there’s schadenfreude, I hope it has to do most with people being amused at the idea of other people thinking you can put this kind of information on the internet without having it get out.”



The breach, like the Sony hack before it, has been indexed and hosted by anonymous public-spirited individuals, and that makes the information that much simpler to abuse. Before Wikileaks indexed the Sony emails, Amy Pascal’s emails and the incursion itself (including the rescheduling of one of the company’s films, The Interview) was the biggest story. Since the Wikileaks page went up, there’s been a steady drip of damaging news items for months.

Now that its user data – which appears to include accounts using .gov and .mil addresses – is public, questions of blackmail and divorce are in the air and at least one organization (Class Action News, a site that posts information about ongoing suits and connects lawyers with the aggrieved) is on Twitter soliciting litigants.

Meanwhile, Avid Life Media, Ashley Madison’s owner, has gone into damage control mode, sending cease-and-desists to people who post even the smallest sections of the hack on Twitter, according to a Vice report. “Avid owns all intellectual property in the data, which has been stolen from our data centre, and disclosed in this unauthorized and unlawful manner,” read a notice filed to Vice by Avid’s director of business development, Jamie Rosenblatt.

The company released two statements today, one calling the breach criminal (without confirming that the user data was genuine, which Krebs and the Guardian have both done independently) and another saying that no complete credit card numbers were stolen. “Every week sees new hacks disclosed by companies large and small, and though this may now be a new societal reality, it should not lessen our outrage,” said the company in an unbylined statement. “These are illegitimate acts that have real consequences for innocent citizens who are simply going about their daily lives.”

Krebs said he suspected the investigation had moved backward, not forward. “I think we’re still a ways off from understanding how this hack occurred,” he said. “The CEO confirmed that they’d been hacked and he seemed pretty convinced it was somebody who had legitimate access to their network at some point and they had strong suspicions about who that person might be. But if they’d apprehended somebody they probably would have said so.

Insider breaches are much likelier to succeed than external threats, though Krebs said the lack of email confirmation for the site’s user profiles might give some people deniability. Of course, at least a few of the database indexes popping up around the web are thorough enough to make that excuse a lot harder for some users. “Some of [the hack-checking sites] are saying, ‘yes, there’s a payment record associated with this.’ That’s more problematic.”