Cyberattackers have stolen and published personal data from online cheating site Ashley Madison. The latter is known as an international dating service with the following slogan: “Life is short. Have an affair.” It is claimed that the portal encourages married users to cheat on their spouses. At the moment, Ashley Madison advertises 37m members.

The infidelity site was attacked by a group named the Impact Team. Aside from Ashley Madison, at least two other popular dating services, Cougar Life and Established Men, also have had their data compromised, as they are owned by the same parent group. The hackers claimed to have complete access to the company’s database, including user records and the financial records of the company and other proprietary data. They have already leaked 40MB of credit card details and the company’s documents.

The parent company admitted that the hacked content was genuine and is currently trying to remove it from the Internet. But the hackers threatened to release more data if the dating sites are not permanently closed. The threats are made in regard to customer records, including profiles with all their secret sexual fantasies and credit card transactions, real names and addresses, plus employee documents and correspondence.

The hackers complained that Ashley Madison charged users £15 to delete their information if they decided to quit the service, but in fact the data is not deleted completely. Since users usually pay with credit card, the site still stores purchase details, including real names and addresses, which users want removed.

The company believes it has found the perpetrator of the hack, which was likely an inside job – not an employee, but someone connected with the company’s technical services. The data dump confirms this theory, especially the part where hackers apologized to the company’s director of security.

Ashley Madison, as well as some other dating services, had earlier been criticized for the lack of care taken over customer data. Three years ago, the online rights campaign group examined 8 popular dating websites and found that only one of them took simple security precautions like encrypted connections by default.