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That's the only way this can go. The company has three options: - Confirm that this (or any of the dumps) is the data. This almost definitely opens them up to
by caseysoftware 11y ago
That's the only way this can go. The company has three options:
- Confirm that this (or any of the dumps) is the data. This almost definitely opens them up to lawsuits coming from a bunch of people who have little to lose. I say "little to lose" because a non-trivial number will be on the verge of divorce about to lose half of everything.
- Keep their mouths shut and confirm/deny nothing. The press will continue on the story until they're bored and move along but that could be a long time because of the names and information involved.
- Deny that this (or any of the dumps) is the data. All they have to do is keep planting the seed of doubt and some portion of the press will hesitate publishing names because they don't want to look like idiots and/or open themselves up to lawsuits. Because of course anyone with an axe to grind will make sure their opponent (or boss or whatever) is listed in one of the dumps to target them. Further, this shields some of their customers and gives those customers' divorce attorney's a "plausible" scenario to fight against.
All of that said, I wonder if there's some way to validate some of the accounts with the site. If you can do that with some of the leaked data, you may be able to prove that some portion of the data set is real..
- inversionOf 11y agoGiven that the dump is straight mySQL dumps, nicely including geolocation data, emails, IP addresses, birth dates, and so on, I fully expect that at this very moment there are people loading servers and building search apps that will allow you to map a location or search corporate IP spaces, etc. It is inevitable, however gray the legalities are. These services are going to start appearing tomorrow with certainty, and they're going to get attention. And we know already that there is a lot of confirmed data in there. At least some of the data is unequivocally true, and the data in this latest release feels very organic.
- mintplant 11y agoI don't understand why you're being downvoted here. Sites like you describe will undoubtedly pop up around this dataset.
- inversionOf 11y agoDenial is a powerful thing, and at this point there are people who still think the genie can be put back in the bottle. I'm just being rational about how these things always go. Quite aside from the inevitable, very quickly built search apps, we'll have infographics galore about the population set of users.
- burnburnburn 11y agoThere's a difference between largely anonymous groupings of data and disclosing PII. I think dumping the member information with email addresses, profile information could happen. Just verifying emails is already happening. But the CC info with last four digits, addresses, names, etc. might be hard to keep visible for any length of time. The Adult Friend hack wasn't as high profile as this one, but has largely been benign.
- enlightenedfool 11y agoIt could make a great data set for machine learning.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 3pt14159 11y agoActually there is an easy way to confirm if this dump is at least part of the AM dump: Public court records from divorce proceedings. When my cousin got divorced one of the two of them had put a key logger on the computer and one of the two of them was using the computer explicitly. It is quite possible that there are lots of records that include the term "Ashley Madison".