As was discovered yesterday with Josh Duggar, there are probably a lot of Ashley Madison subscribers who will be outed with the hack of Ashley Madison by The Impact Team. Ashley Madison is a dating website set up for married people or those who are involved in a committed relationship, specifically so the user can seek out someone that he or she is not committed to. For those who want to see if their loved one has an Ashley Madison account, many are using Trustify. However, can Trustify be trusted? Also Ashley Madison subscribers might have found ways to cover their tracks.
Engadget posted that the hackers have dumped the stolen Ashley Madison data onto the Dark Web last Tuesday. The Dark Web is "a semi-anonymized corner of the Internet only accessible using a special Tor browser and Onion router".
The data set apparently includes account details, log-ins, as well as credit card and payment transaction details. Avid Life Media has stated that "no current or past member's full credit card numbers were stolen from Avid Life Media. Any statements to the contrary are false. Avid Life Media has never stored member's full credit card numbers". If you do go through the 35 GB worth of data, you will find that it is a huge text file that is not searchable, so trying to sort through it to find someone that you're looking for could take quite a while.
In a separate article from Engadget, a lot of people are using Trustify, a service that connects users to vetted private investigators. It has a site where customers enter an email to see if it was part of the Ashley Madison hack, so if you are a suspicious spouse or an Ashley Madison customer, it can be checked. I'm not certain how trustworthy this source is, but here is the Trustify site. Please keep in mind that whatever email that you put there will send the information to that email.
Gotta Be Mobile has stated that over 90 percent of the information exposed was male. It also gives some warnings about anyone who is using Trustify to verify whether or not a loved one is cheating. It is possible that someone could be using your own email address to sign up for an Ashley Madison account. Ashley Madison doesn't have you verify your account via email, and there is a report that an email address of Gotta Be Mobile's own editors was used to sign up for an Ashley Madison account for a woman in Indiana.
Also, most people who signed up for Ashley Madison were probably smart enough to realize that they should not use their usual personal or business email. They probably used a throwaway email address, and I'm sure that most users have at least three emails from Gmail, Yahoo, or a number of sources willing to give out emails.
Considering that Ashley Madison had a little under 40 million subscribers, this is probably going to lead to a lot of suspicious people looking up their loved ones on Trustify or downloading the 35 GB file to check for themselves. The next few weeks of searches by these suspicious people is not going to be pretty.
