Oh, my, there must be no joy in Muddville this evening. At the very least some sleepless nights must be occurring somewhere out there in the hinterlands. It is only natural, after all, when the extra marital affair website you’ve subscribed to gets hacked, and everything about your perverted sexual life is about to be laid bare before an inquisitive public. And their divorce lawyers, of course.
It was announced this week that the “dating” website AshleyMadison.com has confirmed a security breach, and that specific user data may have been compromised. Now, hacking and the loss of customer data has become so routine that it almost borders on the blasé. It’s happened to Target. It’s happened to The Home Depot. Other retail giants of record are TJX, Heartland Payment Systems and Ebay. Ashley Madison, however is different.
You see, the “dating” they facilitate is between married people looking to find partners for affairs.
Oops.
Hackers behind the attack call themselves the “Impact Team.” They have threatened that, if Ashley Madison is not taken offline, they will release all data “including customer records, nude photos, sexual desires, online conversations, matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, along with employee documents and emails” That will certainly have some impact, I can assure you.
The interesting thing about this is the raw numbers we could be talking about here. Ashley Madison claims to have 37 million members. I suspect 36.9 million of them are men. And this isn’t the only adult affair website to have this problem. In March, Adult FriendFinder, which claims a whopping 64 million members, and claims to have “helped millions of people find traditional partners, swinger groups, threesomes, and a variety of other alternative partners”, had 3.5 million people’s sexual preferences, fetishes and secrets exposed after their website was hacked.
Combined, that is a jaw dropping 101 million sexual affair seeking users, all collectively sucking in their gut and lying about their age and weight. They probably should have lied about their sexual proclivities as well, but of course no; that they had to be honest about.
101 million users. Compare that to the paltry 4 million or so users this website will see this year, and it doesn’t take long to figure out I am in the wrong business. Clearly the world's interests lie elsewhere – and with other people for that matter. Perhaps we should look for ways to bring a bit of sexual sizzle into the workers’ comp sector. We could produce a “Girls of Workers’ Comp” calendar, which might shape up to be eerily similar to the ever popular “Girls of Krispy Kreme” calendar series. We could offer a dating service, one that will pair people based on their preferences, sexual fantasies, pharmaceutical regimen and impairment levels. We could have private chat rooms for adjustors and their injured workers; an arrangement sure to spark (possibly sexual) tension where, when it’s all over with, at least one of them will be pretty certain they got screwed.
But, when we see what is happening to these adult relationship facilitators, perhaps we would best to leave it alone. After all, having Home Depot records reveal that you purchased a hammer and two mirrors in a single day (True Story: Do not install a mirror with a hammer. It won’t end well) is one thing. It still has to be far less humiliating than pictures released of you bound with leather straps and panties stuffed in your mouth. Frankly none of us want to see that.
It was bad enough when you used that shot for your LinkedIn profile picture.
It is hard to feel sorry for people who have openly shared such intimate secrets with online services for such nefarious reasons, but then again, with over 100 million of them we are likely to know a few who could be affected by this.
That could make the next companywide picnic pretty darn uncomfortable. Until that time, however, sleep tight. Your secret is safe; until some unknown person decides it should be otherwise.