If you are not familiar with AshleyMadison.com, it is very likely you will be by the end of the week. Boasting 37 million users, Ashley Madison describes itself as “The most famous name in infidelity and married dating”, with their slogan stating, “Life is short. Have an affair.” Due to the salacious theme of the website, they enticed users with privacy and confidentiality… but that all fell by the wayside last month when a collective of hactivists known as “The Impact Team”, stole troves of sensitive data – followed by this demand:
“Avid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails.” They followed through on that threat yesterday.
An Internet firestorm erupted when it was reported that a data dump, which allegedly contained over 35 million email addresses, 33 million accounts with more detailed information (names and addresses), and every credit card transaction of Ashley Madison users from the last seven years, was posted online – although currently in raw form on the “dark web.” It is only a matter of time (likely by the end of the day) before Internet sleuths take the raw data and make it publicly available for anyone and everyone to sift through. This is literally every Ashley Madison user’s worst nightmare.
This type of hack is unprecedented, and will likely have devastating impacts for users online reputation. As one blogger stated:
“If the data becomes as public and available as seems likely right now, we’re talking about tens of millions of people who will be publicly confronted with choices they thought they made in private. The result won’t just be getting caught; it will be getting caught in an incredibly visible way that could conceivably follow victims around the Internet for years.”
What this leads me to is the potential fallout of the Ashley Madison hack for users- strictly from an online reputation perspective:
- If the raw data from the “dark web” is made publicly available for non-technical people on a standard www. domain, it is likely that the data will be crawled by search engines and indexed. This would presumably include names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc.
- Once the search engines index this information, the online reputation of millions of people will be compromised. Now anytime a “Google” search is performed for a specific individual, the information relating to the Ashley Madison hack will potentially be displayed in the search engine results. Where this negative information would rank within the search engines is yet to be seen (and dependent on numerous factors that I wont bore you with).
- There will undoubtedly be curious (or suspicious) spouses interested in seeing if their significant other has been participating in any extracurricular activities. If any unwanted discovery is made, a portion of these individuals will vent their grievances online on social media, forums, gripe sites, etc. This will only serve to amplify online reputation issues.
One can surmise that any domain or entity that attempts to display Ashley Madison user data will be met with intense scrutiny, and very well may be taken down quickly through legal means. When the hack occurred last month, a small sample of the stolen information was posted online. Ashley Madison’s legal team took swift action to remove the information utilizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – which caused a whole uproar in and of itself. Will Ashley Madison be able to quell the proliferation of the unauthorized user data a second time? Only time will tell.
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