Ashley Madison Leaked Data Knocks Down Empires- Slapped With A $578 Million Lawsuit
Ashley Madison leaked data surfaced on the web, after a group of hackers identified as "The Impact Team" exposed the users' names, emails, billing addresses and message history. The Christian Science Monitor revealed that about 39 million users were affected by the data breach.
Following which, two Canadian law firms, Charney Lawyers and Sutts and Strosberg jumped into action. They filed a $578 million class-action suit on Thursday against Avid Life Media and Avid Dating Life on behalf of all the Canadians whose personal data was compromised due to the Ashley Madison breach.
The two law firms issued a statement stating that their law-firm had been approached by numerous former users to inquire about their privacy rights under the Canadian Law, said BBC.
"They (Users) are outraged that AshleyMadison.com failed to protect its users' information," the legal firms shared.
D. E. Wittkower from The Christian Science Monitor compared the practice of deleting customers' data for a fee "to revenge porn." In many cases the information had still been left intact. Though, the users had paid an additional fee to the website to swipe-off their user data.
Eliot Shore told BBC that he joined the website for a short time after losing his wife to breast cancer. But, had never met up with anyone in person. Even then, his name was included in the Ashley Madison leaked data dump.
"The Ashley Madison leak is about a lot more than the public shaming of philanderers," said The Washington Post. Their contributor highlighted that over 15,000 .mil or .gov email addresses had been linked to Ashley Madison.
However, no lawsuits have been filed against the team of hackers who actually exposed the data over the web. In a recent interview, the team told that their motive was to bring the infidelity website's fraud practises into daylight and to eventually shut it down.
The class-action status of Ashley Madison leaked data lawsuit is yet to be certified by the court.
