According to report, some desperate members of the Ashley Madison cheating website tried to hire hackers in the hope that their names can be deleted from the leaked database.
Soon after this week's leak of member's data from Ashley Madison, which is reported to be twice as big as the first leak a month ago, some desperate members of the site tried to frantically find ways of having their personal info erased from the massive data release.
The hacker for hire marketplace called Hackers List published an ad from such a desperate member of the Ashley Madison dating site, offering to pay up to $2,000 to anyone who could remove his account information from the leaked files.
According to reports, hackers released records of around 36 million users of the site. The post to be found on Hackers List was stating: "For what it is worth, I did not cheat, going through a tough time right now, but this is a wakeup call". The ad continued by saying the member of the Ashley Madison site needs a skilled hacker to remove his information the soonest time possible from anywhere it appears.
Another ad on the New York Craigslist claims that the anonymous person who posted it would be able to remove individual data from the release for a fee. According to reports, even Ashley Madison site operator Avid Life Media promised on Tuesday to do its best to undo the effects of the leak.
This is indeed a difficult situation since this incident can lead to marital problems and relationship issues. According to reports, in Britain the first divorce caused by the Ashley Madison leak was already filed.
However, according to security experts, who have analyzed the leaked data, it is by no means would it be possible to effectively erase individual names and additional personal info released from such leaked data. According to security researcher Troy Hunt in a Q&A post about the leak, suppressing any of the information from the database is unfortunately impossible for once the information has been redistributed and socialized, such kind of exposure "is irretrievable".
As Hunt put it, at this point, it is better for the members of the cheating website to focus on damage control -- minimizing the impact, which of course includes discussing with their spouses and partners.
The 10-gigabyte data dump was initially released on Tuesday on a "deep web" website accessible only through an anonymous browsing tool called Tor. However, since then, it became quickly redistributed through the BitTorrent file-sharing network. According to security experts, the information released includes names, physical description, partial credit card information, email addressed, phone numbers and even sexual and romantic preferences of the members.
