The parent company of hacked #AshleyMadison, in the face of suicides, blackmail and litigation, is offering a huge reward for the arrest and prosecution of the hackers who brought them down this month.
#AvidLifeMedia has put a half-million dollars on the table today, in hopes that the hacking community will turn in their own for the mayhem that was unleashed beginning in July with a major security breach of their adulterers’ hookup site.
No one has quite claimed credit for the massive invasion of privacy of AshleyMadison [dot] com yet, and, at this point, what with the dust nowhere near settled, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Authorities in Canada report that the hacking debacle probably claimed the lives of at least two outed Ashley Madison members by suicide this weekend, in what police everywhere around the world fear may become a trend.
“As of this morning we have two unconfirmed reports of suicides that are associated with the leak of Ashley Madison’s customer profiles,” a spokesman for the Canadian police confirmed.
“You just got to understand people, the social impact behind this leak,” he said. “We’re talking about families. We’re talking about their children. We’re talking about their wives. We’re talking about their male partners. That’s going to have impacts on their lives. We now have hate crimes that are a result of this.”
ALM’s porous website boasted nearly 30-million married and mostly-affluent users whose names, addresses and other particulars were stolen in last month’s cyber-heist, then posted online in August for all the world to see that they were serial cheaters.
Some exposed members are being extorted, scammed and harassed as a result, while others are reportedly taking the quick way out instead of waiting around for marital and monetary ruin to come looking for them.
That’s added a touch of tragedy to what’s generally been regarded as a collective comeuppance -- and undoubtedly also accounts for the $500,00 reward being offered from today from Avid Life Media.
“This event is not an act of hacktivism, it is an act of criminality,” the company said, as it braces itself for yet another threatened data dump again.
#XXX #AshleyMadison #AvidLifeMedia #hack #LifeIsShort
