Ashley Madison data breach

In July 2015, an unknown person or group calling itself "The Impact Team" announced that they had stolen user data of Ashley Madison, a commercial website billed as enabling extramarital affairs. The hackers copied personal information about the site's user base and threatened to release names and personal identifying information if Ashley Madison would not immediately shut down. To underscore the validity of the threat, personal information of more than 2,500 users was released. Ashley Madison denied that its records were insecure and continued to operate.

Because of the site's lack of adequate security and practice of not deleting personal information from its database – including real names, home addresses, search history and credit card transaction records – many users feared being publicly shamed.

On 18 and 20 August, more than 60 gigabytes of additional data was publicly released, including user details. This included personal information about users who had paid the site to delete their personal information showing that the data was not deleted.