This week alone, the team behind the Ashley Madison hack have posted what can only be described as a treasure trove of information online, with the first batch weighing in under 10GB and the next batch around 20GB worth of data. In fact there is even a tool that has been posted online by an investigation service that lets you check to see if your email or your partner’s email is part of the hack.
Now if you thought the hack and the ability to search the hacked data was bad enough, a report from Stuff New Zealand has revealed that the blackmails have already begun. The report claims that a man has received an email from a team calling themselves Team GrayFlay, and in the email they are threatening to forward the man’s details to his spouse unless he pays a ransom.
According to the email, “Unfortunately your data was leaked in the recent hacking of Ashley Madison and I now have your information. If you would like to prevent me from finding and sharing this information with your significant other send exactly 2.00000054 bitcoins (approx. value $450 USD) to the following address.”
That being said it turns out that maybe the hackers were just casting a very wide net as the man who reported it is actually single, so all he had to do was change his credit card details (which the hackers claimed they had) and he was good to go, but at the same time we can only imagine that those who are married or have boyfriends/girlfriends might react in a different way.
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