Oops! Adult Dating Website Ashley Madison Hacked; 37 Million Accounts Affected

"Life is short. Have an affair," but always remember "Cheaters never prosper."

AshleyMadison.com, an American most prominent dating website, that helps married people cheat on their spouses has been hacked, potentially putting very private details of Millions of its users at risk of being exposed.

The Stolen personal data may include information from users' real names, addresses and their personal photographs to credit card details and sexually explicit chat logs.

With a Huge Database of over 37 Million users, AshleyMadison.com, owned by Avid Life Media (ALM) company, is a very popular dating website that helps married people have extramarital affairs.

Cougar Life and Established Men, two other dating sites also owned by Avid Life Media, have also had their data compromised.

The Hacker group responsible for the hacks called itself "The Impact Team," a company spokesperson confirmed.

The group apparently raises an objection to the website's morally dubious business model and were threatening the company to release all its customer records if the Ashley Madison and Established Men are not completely shut down.

The Impact Team claims to have complete access to not only personal account information of the company's customers, but also their secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, names, residential addresses, employee documents and emails.

The Impact Team of hackers appears to be upset over a website's service called "Full Delete" that promises to erase a customer's profile and all associated data for a $19 fee completely.

However, according to the Impact Team, Ashley Madison made money from the paid "Full Delete" service that does not work.

"Full Delete netted [Avid Life Media] $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It's also a complete lie," the group wrote in a statement released Sunday. "Users almost always pay with the credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised and include real name and address, which is, of course, the most important information the users want to be removed."

The company denied the claims, however, is now temporarily offering its customers the ability to delete their account completely from the website free of charge.

Avid Life Media is working with law enforcement agencies to investigate this criminal act and also using Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get the personal data the hackers have disclosed so far removed from the Internet.

However, It's unlikely to be a prevention measure, because once the personal data has been publicly exposed over the Internet, it becomes almost next to impossible to stop its spread.


Also Read: Lessons We Learned From Ashley Madison Data Breach