{"id":182532,"date":"2015-08-20T18:51:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T23:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/08\/20\/ashley-madison-hack-data-goes-live\/"},"modified":"2015-08-20T18:51:00","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T23:51:00","slug":"ashley-madison-hack-data-goes-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/08\/20\/ashley-madison-hack-data-goes-live\/","title":{"rendered":"Ashley Madison Hack Data Goes Live\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>I think that a fair amount of thought went into the how it was released, which is <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/security\/2015\/08\/data-from-hack-of-ashley-madison-cheater-site-purportedly-dumped-online\/\">why is why they released the data on BitTorrent<\/a>:<\/div>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Gigabytes worth of data taken during last month&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/security\/2015\/07\/ashley-madison-an-dating-website-for-cheaters-gets-hacked\/\">hack of the Ashley Madison dating website for cheaters<\/a> has been published online\u2014an act that could be highly embarrassing for the men and women who have used the service over the years.<\/p>\n<p>A 10-gigabyte file containing e-mails, member profiles, credit-card transactions and other sensitive Ashley Madison information became available as a BitTorrent download in the past few hours. Ars downloaded the massive file and it appeared to contain a trove of details taken from a clandestine dating site, but so far there is nothing definitively linking it to Ashley Madison. User data included e-mail addresses, profile descriptions, addresses provided by users, weight, and height. A separate file containing credit card transaction data didn&#8217;t include full payment card numbers or billing addresses.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The way that BitTorrent works is that someone puts a file up, and as people download it, they each get a little bit of the file, and then share it amongst themselves, which means two things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There is not a central server to get hammered.<\/li>\n<li>Once the whole file is loaded into this distributed network, it takes a <b>long<\/b> time for it becomes unavailable, because multiple copies of the various bits float around the impromptu network.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In fact, the protocol was developed to help with software firms that saw their servers hammered when they made popular new releases.<\/p>\n<p>After the release, of course, it was applied to songs, movies, bootleg software, etc. <\/p>\n<p>See the picture below for a graphic of how this all works.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.imgur.com\/gXm0kNr.png\" width=\"500\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It has already outed one prominent Christofascist asshole, who I will not name, because <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2015\/05\/they-who-must-not-be-named.html\">he is on my list of <b><span style=\"font-size: 100%; font-variant: small-caps;\">They Who Must Not be Named<\/span><\/b><\/a>, so I will experience my Schadenfreude privately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think that a fair amount of thought went into the how it was released, which is why is why they released the data on BitTorrent: Gigabytes worth of data taken during last month&#8217;s hack of the Ashley Madison dating website for cheaters has been published online\u2014an act that could be highly embarrassing for the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,1060,1051,978,1021,1019,1075],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-computer","category-hypocrisy","category-politics","category-religion","category-schadenfreude","category-sex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182532"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}