University professors and administrators may be beloved parental figures for most of us, but if the Ashley Madison data dump is any indication, they aren’t the most digitally (or cheating) savvy.
When you think professor, you think smart, right? What’s not smart? Using your .edu email account to create a profile on a site that specializes in “married dating” – or what those less evolved call cheating on your spouse. Yet more than 86,000 of the email addresses from the purported hack have .EDU extensions — and our sampling shows that as many as half don’t belong to students.
For those who’ve been at the beach all week, here’s the brief on what has to be the most scandalous security breach in history. In two separate torrents dropped onto the Dark Web, hackers calling themselves Impact Group took aim at Avid Life Media, the company behind AshleyMadison.com, with 30 gigabytes of data they claim comes from Avid’s databases.
Avid’s CEO Noel Biderman denied the veracity of the first torrent, which included over 36 million email addresses, as well as credit card transactions and user profiles. The second drop, however, apparently contains Biderman’s own emails, which may well be the nail in the company’s coffin.
Other than Biderman, who could be looking at class-action lawsuits in jurisdictions around the world, the biggest losers are those with the most recognizable email addresses. There is, of course, a distinction between signing up to check things out and paying for match-making, but to make it requires matching user IDs across a few immense databases — something Gawker did to out Josh Duggar’s paid account and profile.
So who has the most recognizable email addresses? firstname.lastname@yourplaceofemployment.edu
In fairness, the email box on Ashley Madison did say “This email will never be shown or shared” beneath it. And Avid also made millions of dollars with a “full delete “feature that was supposed to permanently scrub users from their database. But if you’re trusting a site that’s all about betrayal, well, you should probably Google ‘online privacy.’ Remember those Instant Messages from 19 year-old Mark Zuckerberg released in 2010? When Zuck’s friend asked how he managed to get data from 4,000 Harvard students, the Facebook founder replied, “They ‘trust me.’ Dumb f*cks.”
Yeah, that was Harvard – one of America’s “elite” universities, as well as one with a solid showing of 166 aspiring cheaters. Of course, that’s only good for third in the Ivy Leagues, behind Columbia (300) and Cornell (322).
How many of those are faculty and staff? Since Ashley Madison also offers an option for singles seeking hookups, that’s hard to say. We checked a sample of 50 emails we could match with a person, and only 20 (40%) belonged to students. While those that couldn’t be verified appear more likely to belong to students or alumni, we’ll leave it to you to decide who’s more likely to use Tinder or Ashley Madison.
So which of our institutions of higher learning lead the pack in cheating hearts? With the understanding that email addresses don’t indicate whether a user advanced from trolling to a paid account, here’s the top 10 universities, ranked by emails caught in Impact’s release. (If you’re in the email database but not the credit card one, we recommend investing a little time getting to know how databases work. And maybe flowers.)
We’ve also like to give an honorable mention to Liberty University (yes, the Christian college), which comes in at #26 with 295.
