re: ATTN OT Divorce Lawyers: Ashley Madison Info Dump Has Happened

The data contains all of the usernames for the entire site since 2008. It also contains the corresponding credit card payments for members who paid for the service. It's like any other dating service, signing up is free, but to do anything you have to pay.

The username/membership information is for anyone who signed up and may (but likely doesn't) contain any information that can be traced back to you. However, credit card authorizations generally require that you enter the name on the card and the billing address of the card. So people who paid for the service are at much greater risk of exposure.

I've looked through the actual data. It's organized like you'd expect database dumps to be organized. There are multiple tables with varying pieces of information. You can't just "look up" someone without matching up the member number from table to table.

If someone used a their legitimate (commonly known) email address, then you could search that table to get their member number. Then from there, you could cobble together their "preferences".

Searching by name is trickier. The "name" data only appears with the payment data, and there are different files for each day (literally) since 2008. However, someone who's reasonably intelligent could append all of the payment tables together so they could search by name across all of the data at once. Again, you could back into other information once you knew the member number.

My guess is that AM will push takedown notices to websites who allow searching by first/last name. Searching by email isn't too helpful because I'd guess most people used a real (but not publicly known) email address.

By email "not being verified", they mean that you didn't have to click a link that was sent to you in order to continue using the site. For instance, this forum requires that you verify your account before you can post. That means there's a ton of "fake" information in the system. These likely won't have credit card info (and real names) attached though.