AshleyMadison.com is back in the news after a new hack exposes millions of members.
Is this the end of AshleyMadison.com? A brand new hack has exposed 11 million users to the Internet after their passwords were cracked.
It’s open season on the former cheating website that has been exposed as not quite what it’s cracked up to be. A total of 100 gigabytes of sensitive documents were leaked recently for the site, which advertises a platform for people to cheat on their spouses but was found in recent investigations to have very few female members, according to an Ars Technica report.
Ashley Madison’s marketing power came down to its discreetness, and now that sensitive information from its members is out in the open, it’s a good question on how long the site will last.
And user passwords were the last refuge for Ashley Madison users, as the passwords were cryptographically protected that used a formula that would take hackers centuries to crack them. However, a group of hackers has found a way to bypass that process and get to passwords much quicker, and a total of 11 million passwords have already been deciphered in the last 10 days. If the hackers get their way, they could crack another 4 million passwords before they’re done, another blow to the AshleyMadison.com website.
The team calls themselves “CynoSure Prime,” and they have identified weaknesses after examining thousands of lines of code. They were able to identify a weakness in 15 million passwords that has enabled them to crack 11 million already and potentially the remaining 4 million soon.
The hackers were able to use GPU tracking to crack hashes. Team members are refusing to release plaintext passwords in order to protect end users, but they have a long road ahead of them to keep more people from having their accounts hacked.
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