Ashley Madison is back — and this time it’s dumping a new kind of data. Moreover, the apparent association (whether true or not) between the individual and the Ashley Madison website, constitutes personal information. The group copied personal details about the location’s user base and threatened to launch users’ names and personally figuring out information if Ashley Madison wouldn’t immediately shut down. Either they ashleymadoson did this because the number of real women was vanishingly small, or because they didn’t want men to hook up with real women and stop buying credits from the company Whatever the reason, it appears that the Ashley Madison money-making scheme was bots all the way down.

Given the nature of the services being offered by the Ashley Madison website (that is, facilitating affairs) and the discretion sought and expected by users, it is reasonable to expect that some individuals might have chosen not to share their personal information with ALM if they had not been misled at registration by the fictitious security trust-mark, and if they had been made aware that ALM would retain their information indefinitely unless they paid a fee for deletion.

However, the service deleted profile data only. Among information released by the hackers is the sexual fantasies, credit card details and personal information of millions of users of the cheating website, including Australian members. July 22, 2015: Impact Team releases the names and information of two Ashley Madison users – a man from Brockton, MA and a man from Ontario, Canada – in the first data leak to come from the hack. While on a free account, you are unable to send first messages, and you can only send a free wink and hope for a reply.

These users are men and women who look up for hookups. If you find your email address was present in Ashley Madison after using HIBP, I recommend working on the assumption that everything you provided AM is either now public. August 19-20, 2015: As researchers continue to sift through the first data dump, search websites pop up that let users search to see if their email addresses were leaked. The perpetrators of the hack — first reported July 19 by cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs — demanded that Avid Life Media take down the Ashley Madison site, as well as companion site Established Men, which is supposed to help young women find sugar daddies.