Beware, cheaters. Things are about to get ugly.
As you've probably heard by now, a group of hackers on Tuesday evening released a trove of stolen customer information from the cheating site Ashley Madison. The massive dump includes 33 million accounts and 36 million email addresses. But is yours (or your significant other's) one of them?
To peruse the data on the dark Web, where the hackers dumped it, you'd need the Tor browser, which allows for secure and anonymous Web surfing by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays. Then you actually have to download the massive data dump, which could take some time.
But now there's an easier way. A programmer with the Twitter handle @hilare_belloc created a tool that lets you quickly check if a particular email is on the list. Just head over to ashley.cynic.al/, enter the email address you want to check, and press the Search button.
The website comes from the same person who in 2013 created a tool to help people check if their email address was included in a 10GB database containing some 150 million customer records stolen from Adobe.
In the case of the Ashley Madison data dump, about 24 million of the roughly 36 million accounts leaked online had verified email addresses. Tuesday's data dump comes after the hackers, who call themselves The Impact Team, last month threatened to release the full data unless Ashley Madison and its sister sites — Cougar Life and Established Men — were shut down.
For more, see Ashley Madison Users Should Have Taken Precautions and How to Create a Burner Account on Ashley Madison (And Other Sketchy Sites).