“Life is short. Have an affair,” or so goes AshleyMadison.com’s titillating tag line. The site promises to pair up married men and women with new partners while keeping the liaisons a secret.
Very little is a secret in our increasingly fragile digital age. This week, we learned about a hacking collective known as The Impact Team that broke through Ashley Madison’s digital defenses. The result? Tons of delicate data may soon hit the web on top of the 2,500 names briefly revealed online.
Very little is a secret in our increasingly fragile digital age.
The Impact Team has a simple demand: AshleyMadison.com must be shuttered or highly personal information will be leaked. That information isn’t just the names of the site’s reported 37 million wannabe cheaters. The group vows to disclose the nude photos and sexual fantasies attached to those names, a huge embarrassment atop data that could easily destroy marriages.
The Impact Team initially posted information from 2,500 site members, but AshleyMadison.com was able to shut down those pages, according to The Guardian. Preventing future leaks, however, could be impossible.
AshleyMadison.com may sound like a fringe web site; advertisements for it have run on SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show,” among other outlets. Major publications like GQ Magazine have covered how it operates and why equality between the sexes has been very good for its bottom line. The site’s projected revenue for 2015 is $150 million, according to BusinessInsider.com, though that figure was determined before this week’s hacking.
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