The Ashley Madison Hack

Unresolved

Unresolved Productions

True Crime, Society & Culture, History

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2023

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"Whoever's responsible - no doubt they know that there are now lots of people wanting to put a bullet in their head. If it were me, if I was going to do something like this, I would make pretty darn sure that nobody could trace it back to me."

On 19 July 2015, an anonymous group calling themselves the "Impact Team" announced via an online post that they'd managed to obtain a large cache of information from website Ashley Madison's parent company, Avid Life Media. The mysterious hacker(s) posted just a small fraction of the stolen data, along with a demand: for Avid Life Media to take down Ashley Madison, a website dedicated to facilitating infidelity, or else they'd release the rest of the data (which included user information).

Over the next several weeks, the threat of this leak loomed large over users, while Avid Life Media insisted that they'd done enough to plug up their security holes. It wasn't until mid-August that the "Impact Team" made good on their threat...

Research, writing, hosting, and production by Micheal Whelan

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Transcript

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0:00.0	John Gibson was a man of faith, a seminary professor and a pastor who taught at the New
0:23.2	Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
0:26.4	He was married with two children.
0:28.1	John spent a lot of his free time working on old cars.
0:31.8	Usually the car is belonging to his students, which he liked to fix up, free of charge.
0:37.0	Regarded as a kind man with a good sense of humor and a quirky laugh, John also had a lot
0:41.9	of demons.
0:43.4	This was made apparent when, in August of 2015, his longtime wife Christy discovered his
0:48.9	body inside of their home.
0:51.0	He had taken his own life.
0:53.0	While John Gibson had struggled with his fair share of issues in the past, namely addiction
0:57.7	and depression, another issue that had presented itself just days beforehand seems to have
1:02.9	played a significant role in his decision to kill himself.
1:06.6	You see, John's name had been included in a sizeable data breach, the likes of which
1:11.0	the world had not really seen up until this point in the summer of 2015.
1:15.8	John Gibson's name was included in a list of millions, users of the website Ashley
1:21.0	Madison, which has become notorious over the past couple of decades, for more reasons
1:26.0	than one.
1:27.2	To fully understand the significance of this data breach and how it led to the irrevocable
1:32.3	decision of John Gibson and possibly others, we first need to remind to the beginning of
1:37.9	the story.
1:38.9	That story being of course, the infamous Ashley Madison hack.
	...

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