Ashley Madison helps you find other people who want to cheat on their partners
The older I get the more I realise how sheltered I am. I spotted a comment by @ruskin147 on Twitter whilst whiling the time away waiting for a late train to arrive:
PR for Ashley Madison says of the plans for a London IPO "they've had a huge number of meetings and it's going very well". Not after today?
— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) July 20, 2015
Intrigued I looked up Ashley Madison to find a site that arranged extra marital affairs for people and claimed it had millions of customers. Not my kind of thing. What all the attention was about however was the fact that Ashley Madison had been hacked and details of its users nicked.
Notionally the hackers wanted AM to stop charging people to remove their details. I’m not really bothered. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Harsh but hey…
I am more concerned with the concept that these databases can be hacked. Of course they can. Even the Pentagon apparently gets hacked every now and again. Shit happens.
I have lots of personal details held at many locations online – Facebook, Twitter, Google and maybe another hundred other places online where I have an username and password. It’s my choice to give this info to the specific websites.
What I don’t want is someone keeping all sorts of information on me without my consent that could will inevitably be hacked and published online for all to see. The government, in compiling its latest version of the Snoopers Charter would do well to note that no database is safe. They will take no notice.
It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the Prime Minster’s voicemail account was actually hacked by the News of the World and that the information was being suppressed. Merely conjecture, rumour spreading, but entirely plausible. I heard it on good authority from a man in a pub.
The only safe way to stop information from being stolen is not to store it in the first place.
PS note the trusted security award on the Ashley Madison site.
