The Net Ain't Secure

The Internet is like the Wild Wild West. The rules of the game aren’t (can’t be?) defined upfront. Rather, we evolve them as we go along because it’s impossible to know what opportunities, situations and loopholes may come up on this frontier.

There’s this site called Ashley Madison whose by-line is “Life is short. Have an affair.” The site facilitates exactly that:
“Have an Affair today on Ashley Madison. Thousands of cheating wives and cheating husbands signup everyday looking for an affair…. With Our affair guarantee package we guarantee you will find the perfect affair partner.”
No, this isn’t a joke. It’s for real! The site has 40 million registered users.

And then the site got hacked. The hackers, who call themselves the Impact Team, demanded that the site be taken down. Or else?
“We will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails.”
To prove they were the real deal, they released a few sample files of data (and continue to do so since the site continues to run). The hackers wrote:
“Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags.”
This sounds like the moral police working with hackers!

The data isn’t easy to access and it is pretty raw (“raw” means not formatted for easy reading/searching), but that’s not a problem for those who know how to program. It’s becoming a targeted search operation, as John Herrman points out:
“They started by searching for people with government email addresses, university email addresses, and addresses associated with major corporations.”
You can see where this is heading: public embarrassment, blackmail and even fraud (with the card details). Herrman wonders:
“Will news organizations, presented with user profiles associated with public figures, ask for comment? Treat each as news? Which ones?”

Does all this worry you, not because of Ashley Madison in particular but because of the general security and privacy risks it brings to your attention? Is it a sign of the future where “every email, private message, text and transaction” could come back to haunt you?

Or do you agree with John Gruber’s take?
“This feels like the plot from a movie — it’s hard to imagine a large scale hack that would create more schadenfreude than this.”

Either way, as the ancient Chinese curse supposedly said:
“May you live in interesting times.”

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