The Ashley Madison hack is “one of the largest data breaches in the world” and has triggered spinoff extortion crimes and unconfirmed reports of suicides, Toronto police said Monday.
Charney Lawyers and Sutts, Strosberg LLP both of Ontario said that they filed the lawsuit on behalf of Canadians who subscribed to Ashley Madison and whose personal information was disclosed to the public.
Avid Life Media says on July 20 it is working with law enforcement in the United States and in Canada, where the company is based.
There were 15,357 registered users who said they were in Johannesburg, 12,560 in Cape Town, 10,237 in Pretoria, and 6,343 in Durban. The hack also exposed personal information from U.S. workers in the White House and Congress, according to 14 News.
Two Ashley Madison users are reported to have taken their lives in Canada after hackers released their details.
More than 30 million email addresses and some credit card data were released as a result of the hack last month.
The Canadian owned website – whose slogan is “Life is short”.
Evans said the nature of the dating site for married people was “of no interest to us as the investigative teams”. The widower said that he had joined the website in search of companionship after losing his wife to breast cancer.
The breach was “very sophisticated”, said Detective Menard from the technological crime unit of Toronto Police.
It’s entirely possible that the traumatic and embarrassing revelations related to the the Ashley Madison data dumps could drive some people to suicide, especially as opportunistic extortionists have started demanding Bitcoin in exchange for silence.
The law firms will not sue the hackers, dubbed “Impact Team”. Among them are “hack checking” websites that compile the emails of the curious entered into them and then send malicious software to those emails.
The company behind Ashley Madison is offering a $500,000 Canadian (US $378,000) reward for information leading to the arrest of members of a group that hacked the site.
Also Sunday, the latest C-lister to be exposed as an Ashley Madison user publicly apologize to his family.
Ashley Madison faces a handful of lawsuits, following a massive data breach.