The Impact Team, the hacktivist group behind the Ashley Madison attack in July, claimed that they have dumped bigger data from the infidelity site on their latest round of attack.
The latest data dump includes emails that were sent by the site's founder and CEO Noel Biderman of Avid Life Media which has its headquarters based in Toronto.
The team behind the attack demanded that Ashley Madison's parent company take the infidelity site down. They threatened about exposing the site's millions of members if demands are not met.
The latest attack includes more data files of the site's members and a number of email boxes that belong to the company's top executives. A further probe on the leaked email addresses show that most of them came from webmail providers.
The breached data include a whopping number of 28 million emails which exposed important information such as first name, last name, addresses and transactions made through credit card. The Impact Team even accompanied the attack with a message that was addressed directly to Biderman. The message reads as "Hey Noel, you can admit it's real now."
The company described the posting as "an act of criminality."
"It is an illegal action against the individual members of AshleyMadison.com, as well as any freethinking people who choose to engage in fully lawful online activities," said the company in a statement.
According to Robert Hansen, the VP of WhiteHat Labs at WhiteHat Security, the top email domains that were used by members whose email addresses were exposed by the hack include Gmail.com (8.7 million), Yahoo.com (6.6 million), Hotmail (6.2 million) and Aol.com (1.2 million).
He also learned that there are more than 13,000 addresses which, to his surprise, would clearly belong to those from the military or government as the emails had domains such as .mil and .gov.
David Kennedy, founder and CEO of TrustedSec, a security firm based in Ohio, said that the data, apart from containing the above-mentioned emails, also contained the source code that was meant for all of the sites owned by Avid Life Media. These include EstablishedMen.com and CougarLife.com, among others.
Kennedy called the latest dump of the hacktivists as a "clear indication they had access to a lot more than the website itself. They had access to the whole company."
The breach is now being investigated by a collaboration between various groups such as the FBI, the Toronto Police Services, the Ontario Provincial Police, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
"I would recommend they shut down at this point," added Kennedy. "They are probably not going to survive this breach."
