Internet security is back in the news this week. Although this time the attack doesn't appear to have been to steal credit card numbers like when they hit Target or Home Depot or to embarrass film industry executives and thwart a movie release like when Sony got hacked. No, this hack seems to have actually had a purpose.
The hacker or hackers — who self-identify as The Impact Team — stole sensitive internal client data from Avid Life Media, a Toronto-based firm that owns the online cheating site AshleyMadison.com as well as other high-brow hookup sites such as CougarLife.com and EstablishedMen.com. The former being a site where older women go to hook up with inappropriately younger men and the latter is a site where, I assume, middle aged men can hook up with strippers of all ages. Sort of like Craigslist.
Evidently the hackers were pissed off because Ashley Madison supposedly lied to their clients and charged a fee of $19 for the ability to permanently delete their personal information and/or profiles. By charging this fee they managed to net $1.7m last year alone. I love it! I guess the new revenue model for the internet is charging people to cancel their membership to your site. If so, Sarah Palin must be raking in the dough.
In a long rambling manifesto the hackers claim the "full delete" feature that Ashley Madison advertises promises "removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site," users' purchase details — including real name and address — aren't actually scrubbed from the database. Which one would think might be just the info these 37 million cheaters wanted removed. But I could be wrong.
So, I gotta ask – Ashley Madison users are upset that the site didn't hold true to its promise? Hmm.... Isn't the irony just wonderful?
The manifesto went on to state "Too bad for those men, they're cheating dirt-bags and deserve no such discretion," which leads me to believe we may have just uncovered the worlds first all female hacktivist organization. Good for you, Ladies. Excellent first move into a primarily male dominated industry.
The hookup service, whose slogan is "Life is short. Have an affair." really should consider changing that to "Life is short. So fuck it up by having an affair.", I mean, whatever happened to truth in advertising?
Anyhoo, while I was reading about this cyber-security incident I was inspired to write a bit of poetry – well, poetry may be giving me too much credit – to tell the morality lesson we should all learn here. I'm not sure if I captured it though. You tell me:
"He came from Nantucket, I should warn ya.
Spend all of your time online looking at porn, huh?
Ended up cheating on your wife...
Throwing away everything good in your life...
And that, my friend, is what we call "Karma!"
C'mon folks, haven't you figured out by now that if you are doing something on-line there is no way it should be considered private. You can count on at least the NSA, Google, probably Amazon, those a$$holes over at Bing and any teenagers in your neighborhood to be tracking your cheating butt.
Might as well set up your password as "BUSTED".
~ EJK
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