Some of the tech world’s brightest may have been caught with their hard drives in the wrong place.
Email accounts from some of the biggest technology companies, including Apple and IBM, were among those outed as a result of the recent hack on Ashley Madison, the dating website for infidelity.
IBM topped the list of 10 tech companies with allegedly valid accounts, according to data-crunching firm Dadavis, which published an analysis of the leaked Ashley Madison data. Apple accounts were reportedly fourth-highest on the list, beating out mobile communications rival Samsung, which came in at No. 7.
An anonymous hacking group posted the data on the dark web. Stories about who uses the site, from government officials to celebrities, have made daily headlines, with some suicides possibly linked to the leak.
Plenty of tech companies supposedly had employees who were exposed in the Ashley Madison hack. IBM allegedly had 311 valid Ashley Madison accounts, according to the Dadavis analysis. In second place was HP with 160, followed by Cisco with 92, Apple with 63, Intel with 61, Microsoft with 48, Samsung with 47, SAP with 30, Oracle with 28 and Qualcomm with 15.
The Dadavis report, which broke Wednesday on The Hacker News, did not name names, but a general web search shows a number of websites claiming to have the information and providing suspicious spouses a way to search for the account of a beloved one.
Ashley Madison did not validate email addresses on users’ accounts, so it is possible people registered under email addresses other than their own.
The United States supposedly led the world with the most government officials among Ashley Madison users with 1,405, according to Dadavis.
Dadavis also reported that of the more than 36 million websites in the Ashley Madison database, 34 percent were fake accounts.
