Ashley Madison hackers: we still have 300GB of employee emails, internal docs, some user chats and pictures, more, but will not dump all of it
YESSSS http://motherboard.vice.com/ ... Violet Blue / @violetblue : Q: Is evidence that ‘Full Delete’ does not work included in the dumps? A: Yes. Many accounts and identities in there. http://motherboard.vice.com/ ... Rory Cellan-Jones / @ruskin147 : “Nobody was watching. No security”:Motherboard has fascinating interview with alleged team behind Ashley Madison hack http://motherboard.vice.com/ ... @motherboard : The Ashley Madison hackers refrained from posting dick pics, they say. Full interview here: http://motherboard.vice.com/ ... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Ashley Madison breach has escalated in stages: a 9.7GB dump on the dark web with profiles and credit-card transactions, then a 10GB file whose internal documents confirmed the user data was real, then a 20GB archive of company emails and internal documents. Today's development is different in kind — the alleged hackers say they are holding back roughly 300GB of employee emails, internal docs, chats and pictures rather than publishing everything.
That restraint turns the remaining trove into leverage and a slow-drip threat over the company. It also lands on top of two credibility wounds already documented in this coverage: BuzzFeed's reporting that the $19 'Full Delete' option made the company millions, and revelations that Ashley Madison ran ~70,000 female bots that messaged millions of male users while concealing them from investigators.
First-order effects
- Ashley Madison's exposure is no longer bounded by what has been published: employees named in internal emails and users appearing in chats and pictures face indefinite risk because the hackers control whether the remaining 300GB ever surfaces.
- The claim that evidence 'Full Delete' does not work sits inside the dumps directly attacks the company's paid core product promise — customers who paid for deletion learn their data may persist.
Second-order effects
- Withheld corporate email gives regulators ammunition beyond the leaked user database: the joint Canada-Australia probe that ended in compliance agreements could draw on internal documents to substantiate findings about bot accounts and deletion practices.
- Rival dating platforms now inherit a trust problem by association — any service selling anonymized profiles or paid data removal gets measured against the Ashley Madison precedent, pressuring them to prove their own deletion claims.
Third-order effects
- If staged leaks become the norm, breached companies stay hostage after the headline fades, and the market for verifiable, third-party-audited data deletion grows out of the wreckage of one $19 button.
- The episode pushes regulators toward treating retention of deleted-user data as a compliance question, not just a security one — the fembot concealment and unfulfilled deletions were business-model decisions, and privacy law is where they get priced in.
The trend: Breach fallout is shifting from one-time data dumps to prolonged leverage over companies, where hackers curate releases and internal documents — not just user records — drive regulatory and commercial consequences.