It’s six months since hackers leaked the names of 30 million people who had used the infidelity website Ashley Madison

End of the affairs: at the time of the leak, Ashley Madison claimed to have 37.6m members, all of them assured the site was totally discreet.

End of the affairs: at the time of the leak, Ashley Madison claimed to have 37.6m members, all of them assured the site was totally discreet.

I t was 9 o’clock on a Sunday night last e upon the scoop of his life. The 42-year-old was at home in Virginia at the time, and wearing pyjamas. For years Krebs had written a popular blog about internet security, analysing thefts of consumer data from big companies around the world, Tesco, Adobe, Domino’s Pizza among them. Now Krebs, as his weekend came to an end, was being tipped off about a more sensational breach. Krebs vaguely knew of ALM. “Life is short. Have an affair” was the slogan Ashley Madison used.

At the time Krebs received his tip-off, Ashley Madison claimed to have an international membership of 37.6 million, all of them assured that their use of this service would be “anonymous”, “100% discreet”. Only now Krebs was looking at the real names and the real credit-card numbers of Ashley Madison members. He was looking at street addresses and postcodes. Among documents in the leaked cache, Krebs found a list of telephone numbers for senior executives at ALM and Ashley Madison. He even found the personal mobile number of the CEO, a Canadian called Noel Biderman.

An anonymous informant had emailed him a list of links, directing him to caches of data that had been stolen from servers at a Canadian firm called Avid Life Media (ALM)

“How you doing?” Krebs asked Biderman when he dialled and got through – still not sure, until this moment, that he was on to a legitimate story.

Then the CEO of Ashley Madison began the slow, careful work of begging Krebs not to publish anything about the most appallingly intimate internet leak of the modern age.

For years it had run a notorious, widely publicised web service called Ashley Madison, a dating site founded in 2008 with the explicit intention of helping married people have affairs with each other

Only a few hours later, in the west of England, a contentedly married man we’ll call Michael woke up and went through his usual Monday-morning routine. Coffee. Email. A skim of the news online. Already Krebs’s story about a hack of servers at Ashley Madison had been picked up by prominent media agencies. The story was a lead item on every news page Michael browsed. Infidelity site hacked, he read; a group calling itself the Impact Team claiming responsibility and threatening to release a full database of Ashley Madison customers, present and past, inside a month. More than 30 million people in more than 40 countries affected.

Though in the days to come the number https://hookupdate.net/sugar-daddies-usa/ca/visalia/ of active users of Ashley Madison’s service would be disputed – was that figure of 37.6 million for real? – Michael could say for sure there were many authentic adulterers who used the site because he was one of them. “I’d taken some elementary precautions,” Michael told me recently, explaining that he’d registered on Ashley Madison with a secret email address and chosen a username by which he couldn’t be personally identified. He had uploaded a photograph. He was experienced enough with adultery websites – Ashley Madison and a British equivalent called Illicit Encounters – to know that “if you don’t put a photo up you won’t get many responses”. But the picture he chose was small and he was wearing sunglasses in it. “Deniable,” Michael said.