See here at RedState for background: suffice it to say that somebody hacked an adultery-themed social media network with supposedly over 37 million people on it worldwide. Contra @iowahawk‘s funny, and profane, quip, it’s not Bill Clinton that needs to worry about this.
Hackers of unknown origin have begun leaking large chunks of user data from the website of Ashley Madison — a social-networking site promising “discreet encounters” for married people and which operates under the rubric “Life is short. Have an affair.”
Bill Clinton’s taste for adultery is so incredibly well-known at this point that it’s not really a security risk. But the Assistant Secretary of State for [Whatever]? Well, let’s just hope that those guys have never used the Internet to cheat on their wives*. Mind you, even with the credit card and address information it’d be a little hard to track them down; you’d need to have, say, a database filled with stolen data about every American citizen with a security clearance OH WAIT.
Moe Lane
PS: Don’t commit adultery.
*Or that they at least told the federal government that they were cheating on their wives. Because not revealing that sort of thing is itself considered to be a security breach, and for good reason. You can easily blackmail somebody who has lied on a security clearance check.
And just think, by cross-referencing the two databases, you could make your social-engineering “honeypot” attempts an order of magnitude more effective.
“…Ashley Madison — a social-networking site promising “discreet encounters” for married people…”
A lie. The internet is not discreet at all. Something every troll ought to keep in the forefront of his squalid mind.
Luke 8:17 — For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.
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Don’t cheat on your spouse. Don’t use a website to cheat on your spouse. Don’t use your real name on a website to cheat on your spouse.
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It somehow never ceases to amaze me how careless people can be on the Internet with their True Names and personal activities.
My last job involved me looking up the public records of people who were involved in recent real estate transactions and calling them up to get more details about those transactions. The market that I worked in was a full-disclosure state, which meant that corporate entities had to disclose their officers and mailing addresses; and the state would publish electronically deeds and legal documents as they got to it. I was *constantly* shocking people by patiently and fully answering the question “How did you get this number?!?” Hell, some of them even found it fascinating. Which it is.