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.
David Pierini is a former newspaper writer and long-time photographer. Considered a luddite by most of his friends, they did not believe him when he broke the news that he would be writing for a technology website. He is fascinated by human nature and would love to cultivate stories about the people driving the tech bus. Reach out to him at [email protected].
6 responses to “Ashley Madison hack airs tech’s dirty laundry”
And then there is the analysis on Wired that tells us there were practically NO actual women on that site. Just lots and lots of fake profiles. Smartest guys in the room you say? Ha!
If these are actual employees, they deserve to be caught using a work email on this site. More likely people just used fake emails so they couldn’t be easily tracked.
You need to write some rules that everyone needs to follow.
Can you please come up with a detailed list of what everyone should do and think on this matter, and post it here?
Don’t use your work email to discuss anything you wouldn’t want the world to know.
A) can be used against you in reviews if your manager wants to see what you do
B) legal action on your company can make those public
C) if company is hacked, it is all tied to your name instead of [email protected] and Mike Rotch
should be common sense really…
The best possible scenario: Do the right thing, even when no one is looking. If you don’t want to get caught, don’t do anything you could get caught for. Unfortunately, many people’s ethics involve trying to get away with something and hoping no one will find out. The whole concept of signing up for an infidelity site and giving them your email address is a disaster waiting to happen, and it did. Duh!