Michigan State has most .edu accounts on cheater site Ashley Madison

Emma Kinery | USA TODAY

A data leak on Ashley Madison, the popular website for married people who want a little something on the side, shows Michigan State University has the most users signing in with an .edu account, according to a recent report in Inside Higher Ed.

But other schools, including Pennsylvania State University and Kent State, are not far behind in the cheater stakes.

In fact, there are far more .edu email addresses registered with the adultery site than .gov or .mil., the report found, noting that 74,468 of the 39 million accounts registered used emails from university servers. (It cautions that Ashley Madison does not verify email addresses, and that "many colleges and universities offer email addresses for alumni as well as students and current and former employees.")

In July anonymous hackers breached AshleyMadison.com demanding it be shut down and, if it wasn't, the hackers would release customer records. On Aug. 18, the attackers, who call themselves the Impact Team, had posted a 10-gigabyte file purporting to be from the website. On Aug. 20, the group doubled down, posting what appeared to be another 20 gigabytes of data — including the CEO's emails.

The data leak has wreaked havoc for the famous and ordinary alike, but the impact on college students, for obvious, unmarried reasons, seems to be minimal.

Here's the list of the top 10 colleges represented on the adultery website from Inside Higher Ed.

Steven Landsburg, a professor of economics at the University of Rochester, has a slightly different take, writing on his blog that he attempted to find out the percentage of faculty at 33 "highly ranked" universities used university email addresses to sign up for Ashley Madison.

His methodology — which he admits is "fraught with peril" — involved taking the number of email addresses from each school and dividing that number by the number of faculty members employed, which he pulled from official school websites or from its Common Data Set findings.

The chart below represents his findings. The first column of numbers indicates the number of .edu email addresses for that school, the second the number of faculty. The final number represents Landsburg's "cluelessness" score for each school -- the percentage of staff members with Ashley Madison accounts.

The lesson for all: Think before browsing.



Emma Kinery is a member of the USA TODAY College contributor network.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.