The fallout from the Ashley Madison hack continues into Tuesday. As reported by the Inquisitr , users of Ashley Madison were already freaking out on Reddit and performing pre-emptive confessions to their spouses that they were indeed Ashley Madison users — some claiming they’d been longtime members of AM prior to getting married, as if to avoid divorce court.
In a statement from Avid Life Media, Ashley Madison confirmed that some of their user data was actually published online.
“Using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), our team has now successfully removed the posts related to this incident as well as all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about our users published online.”
Now that the company has confirmed that a portion of their user data was published online at one point, the hunt is on for actual names of the users. Due to all the Ashley Madison threads being set up on Reddit, the link-sharing site has set up, in response, one major thread, titled Ashley Madison Hack MegaThread — Links, Resources, Warnings — Post all AM stuff here in the “ adultery ” subreddit.
One of the most important links in that thread is the Account lookup for Ashley Madison & Adult Friend Finder , which, as of this writing, points to a “ Was he on Ashley Madison? ” website that doesn’t yet have the Ashley Madison leaked database to search. However, it does contain the Adult Friend Finder Leak search engine, whereby users can plop in their husband’s (or wife’s or their own or whomever’s) email address to see if it pops up with a positive response. If the person didn’t have an account set up on the cheating websites, a response that their email address was not in the leak will appear.
Thus far, a Reddit user named ThrowBasura123456 confirmed that he or she was able to download files purporting to be the partially hacked list of users from the Ashley Madison hack. However, they presume that the files contained porn site users’ info, and not Ashley Madison account holders — save for two users that the Ashley Madison hackers exposed in their initial message.
“I managed to download one of the zip files linked from Pastebin. It does contain a list of email addresses and passwords, but they appear to have been snagged from one or more porn sites that were hacked months or years ago, not from Ashley Madison. And there are no names or addresses. I don’t know if this was the data that the Ashley Madison hackers posted at the links in their initial message, but it doesn’t appear that they leaked anything beyond the information about the two users they doxxed in their message.”
Staying tuned to that major Reddit thread about the Ashley Madison hack will likely provide a searchable database before long. Already, the results of at least one person discovering their husband was an Ashley Madison user are being exposed on the Surviving Infidelity forum , which proves the heartbreak from the exposure of 37 million names could be truly massive.
“Please keep everyone update where to find this info!!!! Caught my husband on AM and I don’t have much info except that he was on [Ashley Madison] (know screen name but not pw) and have the ‘screen name’ of ow with whom he had the affair with…”
In the meanwhile, another item about the hack going viral is the 1-800-Flowers ad that shows two big bouquets of flowers on the left-hand side — with a whole field of flowers in the furthermost right side photo. Presumably, a cuckolded husband or cheated-upon wife would require a whole field of flowers as a start to an apology from someone whose cheating actions were exposed by the Ashley Madison hack. That “ 1-800 Flowers weighs in on the Ashley Madison hack ” has gotten more than 2.2 million views in 13 hours.
[Image via Ashley Madison]