Yesterday I had the pleasure of being interviewed for a Sky News piece on the Ashley Madison breach and the release of its customer database. Only nine seconds of my rants and ramblings made it to air which you can see below:

(The full Sky News piece is shown at the bottom of this page.)

Brian Krebs does a great job describing the whole Ashley Madison saga here and here, so I won’t repeat his fine work, but I will offer my perspectives below that I gave to Sky News:

What do you think of this leak and what are the possible implications for users?

The Ashley Madison leak will be particularly distressing for its customers and could cause real damage to the lives of them and their family. Aside from the obvious embarrassment factor, customers now need to stay alert for phishing attacks on their email, and be ready for blackmail attempts. Ultimately people need to treat everything they put online as being public and that one day it will be leaked. Whether it’s an embarrassing liaison, photo or video, it will eventually get out if you put it online. As a rule, if it’s private, keep it off the Internet.

Do you think there’s is more to this than the ‘moral’ vigilante motive?

Despite what you may see in the movies, large scale attacks such as this are not easy to pull off and require skill, resources and time. Motives are usually money or politics but it’s quite possible this was just a fun prank to prove their hacking skills. It’s also very possible that this whole attack was a to target a small number of known customers for extortion. These victims may have already paid out blackmailers many days ago, and so the attackers are now releasing the data they no longer need.

Is there an issue that so many people are now available to access this personal data?

It’s important to remember that this leaked data is the stolen property of Ashley Madison. So whatever the motives, people need to know what they’re doing before they start trawling through it or even share it. Despite recent claims by Ashley Madison, much of the data has been verified, and contains users’ GPS location, home address and credit card transactions. So it’s very real. But it also contains a lot of fake email addresses and we’ve already seen mud being thrown at celebrity names, so people need to be very careful in believing what they read in this leak.

The full Sky News video containing my clipped piece can be found here: