Hackers Release Second Wave of Ashley Madison Data
This leak is larger than the first and appears to contain the emails of the CEO who runs Ashley Madison's parent company.
By Robert Hackett •
This story originally appeared on Fortune Magazine
The group of hackers responsible for posting stolen data from the infidelity website Ashley Madison to the dark web on Tuesday has continued to publish leaks.
The group, which dubs itself the"Impact Team," released a fresh 20 gigabytes of compressed data—double the amount made public in the first batch—on Thursday.
While the first dump focused mostly on customer details, files inside the second dump appear to contain information that could be potentially more personally embarrassing for the company: the correspondence of Noel Biderman, CEO of Avid Life Media, the parent company of Ashley Madison and its sister sites such as EstablishedMen.com.
Vice Motherboard has posted screenshots of the hacked trove, which contains a file titled "noel.biderman.mail.7z." Additionally, a note accompanying the new leak says, "Hey Noel, you can admit it's real now."
"The message is likely a response to assertions made by the company's former CTO this week," Wired's Kim Zetter reports, "who tried hard to convince reporters after the first leak occurred that the data dump was fake."
(Fortune has not yet reviewed the communications' authenticity. Avid Life Media did not immediately respond to Fortune's request for comment.)
Leaking top executives' emails appears to be becoming something of a trend in the hacking world of late. Sony executives recently suffered through an airing of their dirty laundry. And earlier this year, a breach of the Italian spyware firm Hacking Team exposed the email messages of CEO David Vincenzetti.
It's likely only a matter of time before whistleblower website WikiLeaks makes the cache searchable.
