Ashley Madison owner confirms some legitimate data leaked

by Katie Bo Williams - 08/19/15 2:35 PM ET

Ashley Madison, Leak, Hack — Ashley Madison

Avid Life Media, the company that owns the extramarital dating site AshleyMadison.com, confirmed Wednesday that some of the data released by hackers is legitimate — but that the company never stored credit card information on its servers.

On Tuesday, hackers calling themselves “Impact Team” dumped nearly 10 gigabytes of data on the dark Web that included account logins, credit card info and other details that the group claims it stole from the website.

{mosads}”There has been a substantial amount of postings since the initial posting, the vast majority of which have contained data unrelated to AshleyMadison.com but there has also been some data released that is legitimate,” Avid Life spokesman Paul Keable said in an email to Reuters.

Immediately following the dump, data researchers began questioning whether the data was legitimate. Many came to the conclusion that the dump appeared to include plenty of real information.

“This dump appears to be legit,” said David Kennedy, CEO of information security company TrustedSec, which monitors cyberattacks, in a blog post. “Very, very legit.”

Some users told security journalist Brian Krebs that their real information was in the dump.

Keable emphasized that the company has never stored credit card information on its servers, though, raising questions about where such data might have come from.

Ashley Madison claimed to have more than 37 million subscribers as of July, when the hack was first reported. About 15,000 of the email addresses used to register accounts released in the dump were hosted on government and military servers.

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