Hackers made good on a promise late Tuesday night to post the stolen information of those looking for affairs on AshleyMadison.com, including more than 15,000 who registered with a .mil or .gov address, according to data.
The government and military email addresses come from more than 1,200 unique domains, according to data uploaded to Twitter by user @t0x0. The us.army.mil domain had the most registered users at 6,788, followed by navy.mil (1,665) and usmc.mil (809). The us.af.mil addresses had 54 users and uscg.mil addresses were linked to 46 users.
“Just a lonly[sic] Military man looking for company,” one user wrote, according to the data.
Ashley Madison is an online site where married users can look for a partner for an affair. It advertises itself on the homepage as “the most famous name in infidelity and married dating.”
Hackers last month stole the data and promised to post it if the site, as well as Established Men, which helps young women find older men to be “benefactors to fulfill their lifestyle needs,” were not taken down. Late Tuesday night, the hackers posted names, street addresses and email addresses for about 32 million users, Wired reported.
“Time’s up!” the hackers posted in a message to introduce the data dump, according to Wired. “We have explained the fraud, deceit and stupidity of [Avid Life Media, the site’s parent company] and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data.”
A separate list of .mil and .gov email addresses includes domain names of all of the Navy’s active aircraft carriers. Email domains for the carriers John C. Stennis and Ronald Reagan had the most amount of registered users, at 32. The carriers Harry S. Truman, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower round out the top five with 29, 28 and 27 users, respectively.
Smaller ships also allegedly had users on the site, including 60 emails affiliated with destroyers and more than 30 affiliated with frigates.
Military users weren’t even just at bases in the continental U.S. One user had an email linked to Joint Base Balad in Iraq and four were registered with an email from Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
Users do not have to verify an email address after registration, so it’s possible real emails were being used to sign up by those who didn’t own them, Wired reported. The data dump could also include some fake email addresses.
The hack also includes hundreds of government facilities, from the White House to the State Department to state governments.
Avid Life Media, which owns both AshleyMadison.com and EstablishedMen.com, condemned the release of the data in a statement to Wired.
“This event is not an act of hacktivism, it is an act of criminality. It is an illegal action against the individual members of AshleyMadison.com, as well as any freethinking people who choose to engage in fully lawful online activities,” the company said in a statement. “The criminal, or criminals, involved in this act have appointed themselves as the moral judge, juror, and executioner, seeing fit to impose a personal notion of virtue on all of society. We will not sit idly by and allow these thieves to force their personal ideology on citizens around the world.”
