Impact Team’s Vendetta Against Ashley Madison

Impact Team’s demands were simple: put down Ashley Madison or face the consequences of a data dump.

The latest hacker attack happened not in the Pentagon or NSA servers. Nope. This time around, hackers known as Impact Team targeted the dating sites Ashley Madison and Established Men. They released 9.7 GB worth of sensitive information about its users. With a tagline like “Life is short. Have an affair.” The cheating websites clearly made some enemies on a moral level.

How It All Began

On July 19, Avid Life Media (ALM), the parent company of Ashley Madison, confirmed that their customer database had been breached. The hackers introduced themselves as Impact Team and threatened to publish various sensitive information of its 36 million cheating members.

Impact Team’s demands were simple: put down Ashley Madison or face the consequences of a data dump. The hackers published a 40 MB sample which contained customer data, as well as employee account information, company bank account details, and salary information.

Impact Team's announcement

One of ALM’s biggest moneymakers was their Full Delete Service.

The Data Dump

On Tuesday, August 18, Impact Team made good on its promise and released the data to the dark web using an Onion address and accessible through the Tor browser.

2,43 CSV files containing records totaling 9,693,860 credit card transactions are part of the dump. Actually, the dump is so detailed that you can find the following information on its users:

1. Account creation and update dates
2. Account type
3. First and last name (and nickname)
4. Listed address with zip code
5. Date of birth
6. Profile captions
7. Details of what the user is into and his/her turn ons

Snippet of Impact Team's Manifesto

Impact Team’s Reasons

One of ALM’s biggest moneymakers was their Full Delete Service. Allegedly, the company offered to complete erase all information about a user for a sum of $19 (£12). This turned out to be a lie and Impact Team outed ALM on this scam which made them $1.7 million in revenue last year.

The Fallout

The first celebrity to fall is Josh Duggar. His child molestation scandal has not even blown over yet and he was already revealed to have paid up to $1000 for two premium accounts on Ashley Madison. Two Australian DJ’s also revealed to one of their concerned callers that her husband’s details were in the database. She replied in shock saying, “Are you freaking kidding me?” and hung up after.