Ashley Madison: Adultery Website Hack Could Expose 37 Million Cheaters

— -- There's a reason why cheaters may be extra jittery today.

Ashley Madison, the adultery website which uses the tagline "Life is short. Have an affair," confirmed today that it suffered a "criminal intrusion" into its system which could expose private details of as many as 37 million members and private information from the website's company, Avid Life Media, which runs several similar sites.

"We have always had the confidentiality of our customers’ information foremost in our minds, and have had stringent security measures in place, including working with leading IT vendors from around the world. As other companies have experienced, these security measures have unfortunately not prevented this attack to our system," a statement posted on Avid Life Media's website said.

The hack was first reported Sunday night by information security blogger Brian Krebs, who said it appears the hacker or hackers, who go by the alias the Impact Team, have published just a sliver of user account data and may be planning to publish more each day Ashley Madison and another site, Established Men, stay online.

"Using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), our team has now successfully removed the posts related to this incident as well as all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about our users published online," said an updated statement released by the company.

"Our team of forensics experts and security professionals, in addition to law enforcement, are continuing to investigate this incident and we will continue to provide updates as they become available," it said.

Krebs posted excerpts from the Impact Team's demands on his blog, Krebs on Security.

"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," a message posted online by the Impact Team said.

Other websites run by Avid Life Media "may stay online," the statement said.

The hack was spurred by a disagreement with Avid Life Media's business practices, specifically a "full delete" feature. For $19, the company allows repentant cheaters to scrub their information from the website.

"Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie,” the Impact Team wrote. "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."

Business practices aside, the hacker or hackers also had another message:

"Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion,” the Impact Team wrote. "Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn't deliver."