On Tuesday, August 16, 2015, the entire
world would come to know the team of hackers that call themselves “The Impact
Team”. The group of hackers were able to get by the security of the website
“Ashly Madison” and stealing and releasing the data from all of their 37
million users. The data, 9.7 GB in size, contains the names, passwords,
address, phone numbers, and credit card transactions of the site’s users (2015,
Wikipedia). If getting your personal
information released to the pubic via the internet isn’t bad enough, the purpose
of the website makes it a lot worse.
Ashley Madison
is a Canadian based online dating service and social networking website aimed
at people that are married or in a committed relationship that want to hook up
in secrecy. The Ashley Madison slogan is “Life is shot. Have an affair.” which
makes keeping your data a secrets the utmost importance to the users looking to
cheat on their mates in secrecy. This data leak brings a lot of issues to the
surface including data safety, anonymity, information technology issues, and
social issues.
The Ashley
Madison data leak goes down on the long list of data leaks and cyber security
breaches in history. The data leak is far from being the biggest leak. The
biggest leak was from the “Massive American Business Hack” that happened in
2012, in which hackers stole over 160 million credit card and debit card
numbers from American consumers (2013, NY Daily News). Data protection and
hackers have become a cat and mouse game, in which the eventual losers will be
us; the public that trust companies to keep our data safe.
(2015, October 14). Ashley Madison
[Wikipedia Post]. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison
(2013, July 16). Hackers hit companies like
Nasdaq, 7-Eleven for $300 million, prosecutors say [News Post]. Retrieved from http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/russians-ukrainian-charged-largest-hacking-spree-u-s-history-article-1.1408948
Posts
Great introduction, I will start off by saying my heart goes out to all the families involved especially ones with children. I hope families could find a way to mend there relationships back together and put these sandals behind them. Yes, easier said then done but lets just hope.
ReplyDeleteI will add the advent of the internet these days has made having an illicit affair easier then ever before. Meeting Mr. and Mrs. right, the sequel is a mere mouse click away with anyone with a credit card. It is sad that this is what the world has come to these days, this is one of many leaks and I can almost guarantee that it is far from being the last.