Check If Your Data Was Leaked In The Ashley Madison Hack

Check If Your Data Was Leaked In The Ashley Madison Hack

If you’re concerned that your data, or the data of someone you know, was leaked in the recent Ashley Madison hack, this tool can let you know.

The hack on the affair-assisting site supposedly affected around 37 million accounts, and that means a lot of people are wondering if their data was leaked, or if their significant other’s name is on the list. Private investigation service Trustify is making it easier to check with a page dedicated to scanning the released files for any email address. Just enter an email and click Find Out Now to see if that email was part of the data dump. Depending on the type of account attached to the address, it could contain anything from sexual preferences to the last four digits of a credit card number (if it was a paid account).

Trustify’s privacy policy says they won’t share your info without consent, but if you’re sceptical about giving out your email address, you could try searching the Ashley Madison data yourself — but it’s hard to come by, and there are a lot of fakes out there. Another service, Have I Been Pwned, will also let you search for email addresses in the leak, but they will only let you know if you’ve verified your email address and subscribed to Have I Been Pwned’s email notifications (a precaution used to ensure people don’t search for someone else’s email address).

It should be noted that finding someone’s email address or name on the list doesn’t necessarily mean that person was a real user. As computer security blogger Graham Cluley explains, Ashley Madison did not verify email addresses for new accounts:

…I could have created an account at Ashley Madison with the address of [email protected], but it wouldn’t have meant that Obama was a user of the site… Journalists and commentators would be wise to remember that the credentials stored by Ashley Madison must be considered suspect because of their shonky practices, even before you start considering whether any leaked databases are falsified or not.

Also, if you’re planning to search the emails of your friends or significant others, really think about whether that’s something you want to find out or not.

Further Reading: Do Ashley Madison Cheaters Deserve To Keep Their Privacy? | Encryption, Privacy, National Security And Ashley Madison

Check If You’ve Been Exposed On Ashley Madison [Trustify via Wired]


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