NEW YORK — Now for phase two of the Ashley Madison hack: exposing executives’ company emails.
On Thursday, the mysterious hackers who already broke into Ashley Madison and unmasked cheaters (and would-be cheaters) dumped yet another huge load of stolen data.
This time, it included the emails of Noel Biderman. He’s the CEO of Avid Life Media, the Canadian company that runs cheating website Ashley Madison and many other dating hubs.
It’s a huge file — at least 12.7 gigabytes. The large file size makes it difficult to quickly analyze the scope of the breach. But if the contents are anything like last year’s Sony Pictures hack, the data may contain private conversations, internal company secrets and embarrassing details.
In Sony’s case, hackers exposed the full inboxes (and outboxes) of Sony Entertainment Chairman Michael Lynton and Sony Pictures Chairwoman Amy Pascal. Thousands of conversations with government officials and Hollywood producers proved embarrassing, revealed the darkest aspects of the film business and even cost Pascal her job.
The hackers’ latest data dump hints at the depth of the cyberbreach.
The Ashley Madison hackers first exposed data revealing user names, emails, physical addresses, credit card numbers and more. All of that was quickly made easily searchable online. Hackers also revealed internal documents, worker salary data, and what seems to be real passwords to the company’s PayPal accounts.
There’s no telling how much hackers will expose going forward.
“This seems to be a complete network compromise,” said cybersecurity expert Dave Lewis.