The Vice Media's Motherboard website published on Friday, Aug. 21, an exchange of the group calling itself 'The Impact Team' saying that it was easy to hack Ashley Madison site because it had "no security" and "nobody was watching".
Motherboard declared that its investigators contacted the group through "an intermediary". After verifying the group's PGP signature used for encrypting messaging, they could confirm that the contact was made by the same group that performed the famous attack on the Ashley Madison site.
The hacker group said in the exchange that Ashley Madison and its parent company, Avid Life Media, were guilty of facilitating human trafficking among other abuses. According to the group, they were watching Ashley Madison signups growing and at the same time, human trafficking was also rapidly growing on the sites. The hacker group compared Avid Life Media with 'a drug dealer abusing addicts'.
The Impact Team hacker group leaked nearly 30 gigabytes of files with names, personal information and credit card data of dating website's members. The group also released source code for the websites. According to the hackers, they have far more data, included 300GB of docs from internal network and employees' emails.
The hackers also claimed to have some of the Ashley Madison user chats and messages as well as tens of thousands of Ashley Madison user pictures. According to them, a third of the photos were dirty pictures but they would not release these, nor employees' emails. However, the group reiterated that it is not excluded to release some executives' emails.
The second batch of data hacked from Ashley Madison was released last week, including sensitive computer source code and corporate emails. The group declared that they plan more attacks that will include not just sites but also corrupt politicians and any companies that 'make 100s of millions profiting off pain of others, secrets and lies'.
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against the parent company of the Ashley Madison website in Canada. Members of the website seek damages for their personal information hacked and leaked online.
