Külföldi torrent oldalak Ashley Madison Is Torrenting Its Own Stolen Information

It appears, according to Vice’s tech section Motherboard, that Ashley Madison’s parent company – Avid Life Media – is downloading the data that was stolen from it via Bittorrent.

A tipster managed to grab a screenshot of the torrent peers (other computers downloading the same data) and one of the other users was identified as a machine on the corporate network. The server address, mail.avidlifemedia.com, sounds like an email server, but it may be used for other things too, hence its appearance here.

http://blogs-images.forbes.com/ianmo...4961234861.png

It’s a vague possibility too that an Avid Life Media server has been compromised – company data was included in the dumps – but that seems unlikely.

This is, on the surface, fairly hilarious although it’s also not that surprising. Avid Life Media has been using DMCA takedowns to try and prevent sites from leaking the data. To do this, and be sure that it’s their data, they would need to check it first. That said, DMCA takedown notices are usually done with a lot less care and attention than that.

Interestingly though, when you use Bittorrent to download a file, you’re also sharing that file to other users. In effect, Avid Life Media is torrenting its own stolen data out to those who might want to download it. It’s possible to block outgoing traffic though, but on some torrent sites thight might get you instantly blocked.

Are there any other reasons that ALM might be downloading this data? Well, perhaps. The company has refused to confirm so far if the leaks are genuine, but the company will be very keen to see what data has been stolen. After all, there’s a chance that they won’t know exactly what the hackers have at this point.

The original data dump was 10GB, but another 20GB has been released now. In that second batch appeared to be CEO Neil Biderman’s email archive. Motherboard again reported on this second leak, but later said that the email archive was corrupt although some of the other data in this second leak seems intact.

However you look at it, this continues to be terrible news for Avid Life Media and Ashley Madison. It’s not likely that the firm will recover from this, in business terms. The leaks seem to confirm that the site features a massive number of men – some 90% it seems – leaving a very small pool of like minded women to meet for those using the service.

With the users of this site presumably needing secrecy as a primary feature, it does seem like most potential future customers will want to go elsewhere. But perhaps this whole debacle will dissuade people from signing up to such services online at all. Cheating is unlikely to go away, but perhaps using the internet to stray will take a hiatus for some time.