Ashley Madison - 'Welcome to the first day of the rest of your internet'

otm

yeah it was royally fucked. not even really a friend, more an acquaintance, and that is enough for me to not want to associate with them anymore.

of course it's impossible to have any conversation about this without encountering the Broad Brush Brigade ("well they shoulda thought about that before they cheated!").

so what happens when someone gets a death threat or other hate mail at their physical mail address and their kids see it? Kid's fault for their dad being a cheater, rite?

I was about to say something about some people loving drama, then remembered -- is this your group of actor friends?

nope

that Troy Hunt article is solid. paints an even handed picture, even acknowledges some regrets about the searchable dump they created. I have to dig into it more but it does really cover the gamete of reactions to this scenario.

gamete of reactions bahahaha

gamergate of reactions

skimming e-mail excerpts in the troy hunt thing is pretty harrowing

I think it was Dan Savage who mentioned that for many people, signing up for a site like AM was in itself a kind of fantasy or daydream of infidelity that probably stopped way short of any actual affairs. Which made me realize that the number of honest to god serial cheaters involved in this is probably a pretty small number compared to the greater number of unhappy monogamists who let a fantasy go too far into reality--which is to say people who are flawed but deeply normal and sympathetic except for trusting an Internet site with their credit card info.

That's an overwhelming concern. The other being that the hackers decided to take something that spouses would typically handle themselves in private and make it public news to a bunch of strangers who didn't fucking need to know it.

agree with HSB in this thread but i don't think the hackers were really trying to justify themselves beyond the level of prurient oneupmanship. it should be pretty obvious to pretty much everyone that they're cunts for doing this

Lack of support from Avid Life Media

Troy Hunt article def not funny, but admit I did let go a lol at this

This is amazing.

Stepping back from the ruined lives and the embarrassment and the shame, this is an amazing look at these singular moments of one person sitting in front of a computer, deciding how they're going to go about paying for this service. Making that choice to go in on it.

I keep seeing over and over things like

AMERICAN EXPRESS GIFT CARD | anon1982_✧✧✧@a✧✧.c✧✧ | 4388 Duckett Lane APT 2F, Springdale, AR, 72988

is there anything to determine for sure in this case that's that guy's real street address and not one he just picked at random out of the phone book?

quick google says that zip code doesn't exist (too high for arkansas, too low for oklahoma), there's no duckett lane in arizona, etc. i don't know whyt i am looknig tihs up but the "apt 2f" is a nice touch, and i am surprised that the site let him enter a non-existent zip code, liek don't they usually have a thing that blocks you from doing that? as a canadian who had to sign up to things in the past i had to actually like research where zip codes were to make fake accounts to download music or whatever

If they don't require email verification, they probably dgaf about anything beyond whether your payment clears.

I think pp made up that address as an example

oh i am smart

Yes.

I mean, I'm not going to start posting real names and addresses.

If they don't require email verification, they probably dgaf about anything beyond whether your payment clears.

My favorite address field so far has been something like "What, you mean my real address?" listed.

but the "apt 2f" is a nice touch

Thank you!

as a canadian who had to sign up to things in the past i had to actually like research where zip codes were to make fake accounts to download music or whatever

easiest to just always go with 90210. not that i have done this. least of all with my ashley madison account

90210 worked, i usually went with a 10 or 11 new york one because i knew my aunt's old address

http://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-the-women-in-the-ashley-madison-database-1725558944

hilarious

I started my search in an obvious place. Were there any patterns in the personal email addresses that people listed when they signed up? I figured that if I were an admin at Ashley Madison creating fake profiles, I would use ashleymadison.com for the email addresses because it’s easy and obvious. No real Ashley Madison customer would have an Ashley Madison company email. So I searched for any email address that ended in ashleymadison.com. Bingo. There were about 10 thousand accounts with ashleymadison.com email addresses.

looooool

About two-thirds of the men, or 20.2 million of them, had checked the messages in their accounts at least once. But only 1,492 women had ever checked their messages. It was a serious anomaly.

...

Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.

The men’s accounts tell a story of lively engagement with the site, with over 20 million men hopefully looking at their inboxes, and over 10 million of them initiating chats. The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.

Sure, some of these inactive accounts were probably created by real, live women (or men pretending to be women) who were curious to see what the site was about. Some probably wanted to find their cheating husbands. Others were no doubt curious journalists like me. But they were still overwhelmingly inactive. They were not created by women wanting to hook up with married men. They were static profiles full of dead data, whose sole purpose was to make men think that millions of women were active on Ashley Madison.

i would just like to point out that i have been otm in this thread

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/08/who-hacked-ashley-madison/

The Toronto cops mostly recapped the timeline of known events in the hack, but they did add one new wrinkle: They said Avid Life employees first learned about the breach on July 12 (seven days before my initial story) when they came into work, turned on their computers and saw a threatening message from the Impact Team accompanied by the anthem “Thunderstruck” by Australian rock band AC/DC playing in the background.

well, I'm on Team Hacker now

they should have led off their manifesto with that tidbit

dang, mr ashley madison is gonna be sued into oblivion

Has anyone come up with an estimate for how many actual affairs came about through AM?

how would anyone on earth know that? jeeze

http://gawker.com/5928591/back-in-hack-computer-researcher-stumped-by-acdc-virus-at-iranian-nuclear-facilities

well, I'm on Team Hacker now

― frogbs, Wednesday, August 26, 2015 9:43 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

steady on now

it should be utterly plain that such a site would be a corrupt, exploitative sausagefest

this isn't the issue here

well, I'm on Team Hacker now

― frogbs, Wednesday, August 26, 2015 10:43 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why? the people they attacked were the users of the site. if they gave a shit about the corrupt nature of the site owners they'd have just rendered the damn thing unusable.

so in summary most of the action anybody got was a little self tug-tug while staring at fake women.

in other words....

ARIANE

Krusty: Ooh! Sex Chat! (dials)
Voice: You've reached the Party Line! In a moment, you'll be connected to a hot party, with some of the world's most beautiful women! Now, let's join the party!
Krusty: Hello?
Man 1: Hello?
Man 2: Hello?
Apu: Are there any women here?
Krusty: Hello!?
Apu: Are you a beautiful woman?
Krusty: Do I sound like a beautiful woman?
Apu: This is not as hot a party as I anticipated.

why? the people they attacked were the users of the site. if they gave a shit about the corrupt nature of the site owners they'd have just rendered the damn thing unusable.

yeah I'm not condoning any of this I just think the AC/DC is a nice touch

Nazareth "Hair of the Dog" woulda been better

timing of this couldn't be better for Ashley Monroe's career tbh

meh...it is what it is. hacktivism will never cease to exist.

groups like cDc will continue to go against laws and the 'norm', both written and unwritten. but hopefully we can keep discussing ethics and morality more openly.

it's silly to think we can 'fix' these people or 'stop' h4x0rs

what's bizarre is people continue to do things on their machines or on the internet as if there were no trace of their actions

people in my hometown of conservative upper middle class gossip hounds are freaking out about this. I highly regret looking at the paid list. saw a bunch of friends' dads. it's quite scary that literally no data is safe. everyone has embarrassing shit buried in gchats or text. whoever compared this to a black mirror episode is otm.

When AM hit critical mass enough to get that brand recognition, every network security person I know was saying "wow, they're going to be the biggest black mail hacker target in existence."

what's bizarre is people continue to do things on their machines or on the internet as if there were no trace of their actions

^^^^^^^^

sad/screwed up that they even offered a "forget me" package for sale which they got tens of thousands of people to pay for (and obviously did not delete the data), at the very least there should be a class-action lawsuit that they lied on that one

there's already a $500+ milli class-action lawsuit happening... and apparently an AC/DC-loving suspect?

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/security-blogger-may-have-new-lead-in-ashley-madison-hacking/?_r=0

"Yeah. But remember, we're the thunderstruck bandits. The thunderstruck bandits. T-H-U..."
http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/christmasspecials/images/3/3d/Home-alone-17.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20111109000314

i don't want to discount how awesome that Thunderstruck bit is
magnificent

http://boingboing.net/2015/08/26/ashley-madison-looks-like-it-w.html

An analysis of the accounts indicates that there were 20,000,000 men active on the site and 1,492 women regularly checking messages.

makes me curious about this article - http://www.gq.com/story/ashley-madison-affair-cheating-site

lol good to see short fiction getting a platform in a big mag like GQ

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/8/ashley-madison-users-are-getting-off-too-easy.html

lmao for sure man