The Ashley Madison Hack

"Whoever's responsible - no doubt they know that there are now lots of people wanting to put a bullet in their head. If it were me, if I was going to do something like this, I would make pretty darn sure that nobody could trace it back to me."

On 19 July 2015, an anonymous group calling themselves the "Impact Team" announced via an online post that they'd managed to obtain a large cache of information from website Ashley Madison's parent company, Avid Life Media. The mysterious hacker(s) posted just a small fraction of the stolen data, along with a demand: for Avid Life Media to take down Ashley Madison, a website dedicated to facilitating infidelity, or else they'd release the rest of the data (which included user information).

Over the next several weeks, the threat of this leak loomed large over users, while Avid Life Media insisted that they'd done enough to plug up their security holes. It wasn't until mid-August that the "Impact Team" made good on their threat...

Research, writing, hosting, and production by Micheal Whelan

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