The Ashley Madison leaked list of names is slowly going mainstream. First off, CBS Boston revealed that an Ashley Madison user with the ID of “Heavy73” out of Massachusetts had been part of the initial two men on the Impact Team’s hacked list. As reported by the Inquisitr , that man’s full name, address, sexual proclivities, and the fact that he joined Ashley Madison the day after Valentine’s Day in 2014 were still available online on Wednesday. While no Ashley Madison users’ names will be published in this article, the 42-year-old American man who was leaked in the hacking appears to have a LinkedIn page, and a photo of the man with his young daughter that once existed on Twitter has been deleted. The other man revealed on the Ashley Madison hacked list is a Canadian man who is less visible online.
On hacker forums, the full initial hacked list of 2,500 names is being shared — but hackers are using “mirror” sites and temporary links in order to avoid the DMCA takedown requests that Avid Media claimed worked to remove the 2,500 Ashley Madison users list of names published online. Instead, on hacker forums, intrepid hackers are keeping links to the 2,500 names live for only one hour, for example, in a shell game of moving personal and private data.
“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.”
The entire initial leak of 2,500 Ashley Madison user names and lots of other personally identifiable information is in the hands of at least one user on a forum whose name will not be mentioned here, but the forum user writes that they prefer not to share it via a website. Instead, off-forum vehicles or private messages are the routes being taken by those sharing the data underground — some with nefarious purposes, likely involving blackmailing folks to pay to remove their names from the Ashley Madison hacked list.
Those removal requests are likely pipe dreams, especially if the list of 2,500 Ashley Madison names are being shared by hackers. Meanwhile, writers like Carmen Fishwick of the Guardian have documented the arduous process it took to get Fishwick’s forgotten Ashley Madison password in order to delete Carmen’s account.
“On the fifth call, I eventually reached an agent who could reset my password so that I could delete my account. I was put on hold for a few minutes. The customer service agent returned with good news: I had a new password. It was 12345.”
Concerned users can stay tuned to sites like haveibeenpwned.com , washeonashleymadison.com , and Reddit to remain updated on compromised data and search for their own email addresses in leaked data.
[Image via Ashley Madison]