Ashley Madison Hack: Park Slope Residents Frequented Cheating Site

As AshleyMadison.com hackers release gigabytes upon gigabytes of personal information about the site’s millions of registered users, Park Slope cheaters might be getting a little sweaty.

That’s because the extramarital affairs website, otherwise known as OK Cupid for cheaters, had previously named Park Slope — or rather, the 11215 zip code, which also covers parts of Gowanus and Windsor Terrace — as home to its largest user base in the NYC metro area.

Ten percent of NYC-based Ashley Madison live in Park Slope, the site said in 2014. (Although Park Slope was nudged into second place by Tribeca in 2015.)

Ashley Madison reportedly matched zip codes with Census data to determine its most loyal neighborhood populations.

Wired Magazine reported Tuesday that hackers, who go by the name Impact Team, have claimed responsibility for posting about 9.7 gigabytes of data from two sites on the ”dark web,” an underground internet that can only be viewed with special browsers. It can now easily be downloaded from torrent sites.

The hackers had previously threatened to leak personal information on the more than 30 million users of the website, as well as a similar partner site called EstablishedMen.com, if the owners did not shut them down. Both are owned by Toronto-based Avid Life Media, which has not taken down the sites.

The posted data included profile and account information including names, addresses and credit-card transactions, but not actual credit-card numbers, according to Wired.

Josh Duggar was outed on Wednesday as an apparent paying member of the site. The French leak monitoring firm CybelAngel also reported that 15,000 users had .gov or .mil email addresses.

Will the Park Slope elite — or your husband — be next?

Wired recommends resisting the urge to check. “We should not search this database for our loved ones,” Emily Dreyfus wrote. “We should take our kids to the water park. We should close our computers and walk out into the sunshine of late summer and feel the heat of our glorious life-sustaining superstar on our cheeks.”

However, she also reported that there is one (legal) way to do so, if you really feel you need to know — or need to check on your own information.

In response to the hack, Ashley Madison released the following statement on Tuesday.

Last month we were made aware of an attack to our systems. We immediately launched a full investigation utilizing independent forensic experts and other security professionals to assist with determining the origin, nature, and scope of this attack. Our investigation is still ongoing and we are simultaneously cooperating fully with law enforcement investigations, including by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Ontario Provincial Police, the Toronto Police Services, and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

We have now learned that the individual or individuals responsible for this attack claim to have released more of the stolen data. We are actively monitoring and investigating this situation to determine the validity of any information posted online and will continue to devote significant resources to this effort. Furthermore, we will continue to put forth substantial efforts into removing any information unlawfully released to the public, as well as continuing to operate our business.

This event is not an act of hacktivism, it is an act of criminality. It is an illegal action against the individual members of AshleyMadison.com, as well as any freethinking people who choose to engage in fully lawful online activities. The criminal, or criminals, involved in this act have appointed themselves as the moral judge, juror, and executioner, seeing fit to impose a personal notion of virtue on all of society. We will not sit idly by and allow these thieves to force their personal ideology on citizens around the world. We are continuing to fully cooperate with law enforcement to seek to hold the guilty parties accountable to the strictest measures of the law.

Every week sees new hacks disclosed by companies large and small, and though this may now be a new societal reality, it should not lessen our outrage. These are illegitimate acts that have real consequences for innocent citizens who are simply going about their daily lives. Regardless, if it is your private pictures or your personal thoughts that have slipped into public distribution, no one has the right to pilfer and reveal that information to audiences in search of the lurid, the titillating, and the embarrassing.

We know that there are people out there who know one or more of these individuals, and we invite them to come forward. While we are confident that the authorities will identify and prosecute each of them to the fullest extent of the law, we also know there are individuals out there who can help to make this happen faster. Anyone with information that can lead to the identification, arrest, and conviction of these criminals, can contact information@avidlifemedia.com.