The Impact Team & The Impact
In July 2015, a group known as "The Impact Team" abducted the user data of Ashley Madison, a comercial website that enabled individuals to secretly make extramartial affairs. The group extracted the user data base of the site and threatened to expose the users' personal information if the site was not soon shut down. The Impact Team have posted personal information such as e-mail addresses and account details from over 37 million members of the site. The group has claimed two motivations: First, they’ve criticized Ashley Madison’s core mission of arranging affairs between married individuals. Second, they’ve attacked Ashley Madison’s business practices, in particular its requirement that users pay $19 for the privilege of deleting all their data from the site (but, as it turns out, not all data was removed). This entire incident caused immense conflict among members of Ashley Madison because their personal information such as emails and credit card numbers were revealed to the public as well as their identity on the site to their own spouses. Even family members of the members of Ashley Madison have been affected as well because of shame and disappointment from simply being related to the victims. Many individuals among society raised discussions of whether the hack was an appropriate method of handling the goal of disabling the site due to encouraging extramartial affairs. Many feared that their own personal information may have been leaked from being used within fake accounts.
Personal Thoughts & Opinions
Although the hack has nothing to do with myself, it can still affect me because my personal information could have been used for a fake account by identity thieves. Privacy means to possess the freedom of being able to do what you must do without anyone or anything to interfere with you. To prevent from being hacked, you can determine whether what you are about to do is reliably safe and that maximum security is confirmed. The best thing to do however is to simply restrain from any risky actions and secure your personal information.