The moralistic hackers who call themselves The Impact Team, decided that it was better to save the marriages of countless people by providing a database where people can look up if their partner was cheating on them by registering on the site. Because nothing saves a marriage faster than the disclosure that someone is having an affair and the other partner was not invited.
Moralistically this is the best thing to do, although putting them on the dark web also means that amateur blackmailers could make a fortune by searching through the names and ringing up victims for a "donation." But hey, these are moralistic hackers.
After threatening to release salacious details on as many as 37 million customers of the website, which uses the slogan "Life is short. Have an affair," hackers claimed to publish a huge cache of email addresses and credit card data nicked in July.
The hackers have appointed themselves as "the moral judge, juror, and executioner, seeing fit to impose a personal notion of virtue on all of society," the company said in a statement.
"These are illegitimate acts that have real consequences for innocent citizens who are simply going about their daily lives," it said.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating the theft alongside the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and local police, it said.
The hackers, who call themselves The Impact Team, leaked snippets of the compromised data in July and threatened to publish names and nude photos and sexual fantasies of customers unless Ashley Madison and another site owned by Avid Life were taken down.
"Avid Life Media has failed to take down Ashley Madison and Established Men," tech website Wired quoted The Impact Team as saying in a statement accompanying the online dump.
"We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM (Avid Life Media) and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data," the hackers said, according to Wired.
Wired said 9.7 gigabytes of data was posted, and that appeared to include member account and credit card details.
