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Everyone at risk
Many former Ashley Madison clients have written to cyber-security author and developer Troy Hunt (photo) to say they signed up out of curiosity or other reasons and never used the service, although their information remains.
Beyond the considerable security risks and emotional toll the Ashley Madison data breach may bring, there are reasons for people who have absolutely no connection to the site to worry.
First, some of the Ashley Madison accounts were undoubtedly fraudulent, registered under other people’s names or email addresses. The result is that individuals who never visited the site might come under suspicion.
Secondly, it’s very likely the Ashley Madison information has already been vacuumed up by large data aggregation firms, which cross-reference personal information of all sorts to create complex and highly personal profiles of millions of people online that they sell to companies such as Google and Facebook.
“For example, take what size pants you wear combined with what sort of cable TV plan you have,” Harvard researcher Adam Tanner says. “Together, they might suggest you’re overweight, you watch a lot of sports, and you spend a lot of sedentary time at home. So now, maybe a health insurer might deem you a higher risk. We should really be cautious about how seemingly unconnected information may be used to discriminate against you or create some really negative impact.”
If you have a friend, or a friend of a friend, who was an Ashley Madison client, and the two of you are linked in any way on social media, this bit of information will now be permanently part of your digital profile.
The Ashley Madison hack is just the latest in a series of massive data breaches of private information, leading some to wonder whether the Internet at present is just too unsecure to keep anything private.
“For people who aren’t Ashley Madison customers, there’s very little immediate term impact beyond monopolizing their news headlines," cyber-security author Hunt said. "The bigger picture, though, is what it signals for online security and that’s something we all should be learning from; you just cannot trust websites to keep personal details private.”
There may be a short ray of hope for Ashley Madison clients and the millions of others who have had private information breached and stolen in a cyber-attack. Just this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that the Federal Trade Commission can take legal action against Internet firms that “…unreasonably and unnecessarily exposed consumers’ personal data to unauthorized access and theft.”
http://www.troyhunt.com/
