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In July 2015, an unknown person or group calling itself "The Impact Team" announced they had stolen the user data of Ashley Madison, a commercial website billed as enabling extramarital affairs. The hacker(s) copied personal information about the site's user base and threatened to release users' names and personal identifying information if Ashley Madison would not immediately shut down. As evidence of the seriousness of the threat, the personal information of more than 2,500 users was initially released. The company initially denied that its records were insecure, but it continued to operate.
Because of the site's lack of adequate security and practice of not deleting users' personal information from its database – including real names, home addresses, search history and credit card transaction records – many users feared being publicly shamed.[1]
On 18 and 20 August, more than 60 gigabytes of company data was publicly released, including user details. The released data even included personal information about users who had paid the site to delete their personal information since the company had not deleted the data they claimed to have erased.