User details leaked in adultery site hack; Toshiba CEO quits over $1.7bn scandal; PayPal splits from eBay

Online dating website Ashley Madison has been hacked, with attackers leaking the personal information of some of the site’s users and threatening to release even more, according to security blog KrebsonSecurity.

Ashley Madison is a dating site aimed at married people, and carries the slogan “Life is short. Have an affair.”

Krebs reported that the hackers — who call themselves The Impact Team — released sensitive data stolen from Avid Life Media, the firm that owns Ashley Madison and other similar sites.

The hackers have reportedly leaked personal information from some of Ashley Madison’s users, as well as data about Avid Life Media itself, including company bank account data and salary information.

Krebs posted parts of a statement from The Impact Team. One part of the statement read: “We have taken over all systems in your entire office and production domains, all customer information databases, source code repositories, financial record, emails.”

According to Krebs, the hacking group said it published the information in response to a “full delete” service from Avid Life Media. The service purports to completely erase a customer’s Ashley Madison information — but The Impact Team claims the service doesn’t fully erase a customer’s data.

“Full delete netted ALM $1.7m in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie,” Krebs quoted the group as saying. “Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.”

According to Reuters, Avid Life Media has denied that the full delete function doesn’t remove all information about a member’s profile and communications, and is offering the function free of charge following the breach.

Krebs quoted the hackers as saying: “Avid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails. The other websites may stay online.

“We’ve got the complete set of profiles in our DB dumps, and we’ll release them soon if Ashley Madison stays online. And with over 37 million members, mostly from the US and Canada, a significant percentage of the population is about to have a very bad day, including many rich and powerful people,” the hackers reportedly wrote.

Toshiba execs quit over accounting scandal

Multiple executives at Toshiba — including the company’s CEO — will quit in the wake of an accounting scandal worth almost $2 billion, according to The Guardian.

Toshiba’s CEO and president, Hisao Tanaka, and its vice-chairman, Norio Sasaki, will reportedly leave.

The Guardian reported earlier that an independent investigation found that over several years Toshiba had overstated its operating profit by 151.8 billion yen (about AU$1.7bn).

The investigation reportedly found that both Tanaka and Sasaki were aware of the overstatement of profits.

“[W]hen top management presented ‘challenges’, division presidents, line managers and employees below them continually carried out inappropriate accounting practices to meet targets in line with the wishes of their superiors,” The Guardian quoted a report on the investigation as saying.

Tanaka reportedly said he did not tell anyone to falsify accounts, but said he would take responsibility for the investigators’ findings.

PayPal splits from eBay

PayPal has separated from eBay and has listed on the Nasdaq, Forbes reports.

In an interview with Forbes, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman gave some hints on the future of the payments company.

“We want to be more than a proprietary button on an online website and go from online to in-app and then having people use those apps in stores. That’s creating this new market for us to pursue, a [USD]$25 trillion addressable market,” Schulman said.

The CEO also discussed his company’s acquisition strategy, saying: “We go into this next chapter with no debt and [USD]$6.6 billion in cash. That will afford us the opportunity to look carefully at various players in the payments industry and look to see where an acquisition makes sense.”

Image courtesy Pascal under CC