It goes without saying, that if you enter into marriage with your spouse, you should stick to your vows and using a site such as AshleyMadison.com is a very bad idea. Unfortunately, over 50% of marriages in the United States end in divorce, people are going to be unfaithful and it seems that the Ashley Madison site was a platform that made cheating a bit easier for quite a few people. That said, I’d like to look at the bigger picture of the situation. You are talking about 36 million email addresses, a rather astounding number. Not to mention over 10,000 emails with a .gov domain. Its difficult to fathom how many divorces will come of this. Unfortunately, it has already been reported that there have been two suicides due to the hack. You have celebrities involved, such as Snookie from Jersey Shore’s husband, Josh Duggar, and plenty of others. As the story moves on, it seems to get worse every day. When looking at a number of that size, you have think that everyone at least tangentially knows someone on that list who is quaking in their boots at their spouse discovering their email address in the database.
The bigger question for me is where this takes us from an online security standpoint? We already had the iCloud hack last September, where plenty of celebrities had their private photographs posted online for the world to see. Now that we have 10,000 people in government exposed, maybe this will be the catalyst to bring some change to how data is secured online. There is no question that more and more of our lives are going to be lived online, and passwords will be more and more important. I already have troubles remembering the logins for the 50+ online interfaces I work with. Where do we go from here? To we stick with Apple’s idea of a thumb print? Do we all have microchips embedded in the back of our hands for passwords and credit cards? It will be interesting to see how it develops, but that is only half of the picture. The Ashley Madison hack was not on the user side, it was on the server side, attacking the database directly, regardless of the passwords kept by the user.
Target had a huge leak of credit card information, hackers stole over one billion dollars from banks in a data hack. Is your data is safe any longer? You would have to think that a hack of this magnitude and content will be a detriment to sensitive sites, especially adult content, going forward. The question is what can be done to rectify the situation? There will always programmers out there trying to protect data in the most robust and effective fashion, and just as many hackers doing everything they can to break through that security wall. With any new medium there will always be growing pains. However, the internet has been a major part of our lives for almost 20 years now, and its seems that there is a new article about a security breach each week. Regardless of the content of your data, your data is just that, ‘yours’, and its a problem that needs to be addressed more sooner than later.
