The worst nightmare of those who use the internet to engage in finding partners for extramarital sexual flings has been realized. The popular online flesh bazaar Ashleymadison.com has reportedly been hacked and the intimate data on up to 37 million users compromised. This is the latest in a long line of cyber crimes and will no doubt serve as another nail on the coffin for American civil liberties as Emperor Barack Obama and his servile lackeys in Congress will have yet another excuse to push through their Holy Grail of a cybersecurity bill.

The computer security website Krebs on Security reports on the hack in the story “Online Cheating Site AshleyMadison Hacked”:

Large caches of data stolen from online cheating site AshleyMadison.com have been posted online by an individual or group that claims to have completely compromised the company’s user databases, financial records and other proprietary information. The still-unfolding leak could be quite damaging to some 37 million users of the hookup service, whose slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair.”

The data released by the hacker or hackers — which self-identify as The Impact Team — includes sensitive internal data stolen from Avid Life Media (ALM), the Toronto-based firm that owns AshleyMadison as well as related hookup sites Cougar Life and Established Men.

Reached by KrebsOnSecurity late Sunday evening, ALM Chief Executive Noel Biderman confirmed the hack, and said the company was “working diligently and feverishly” to take down ALM’s intellectual property. Indeed, in the short span of 30 minutes between that brief interview and the publication of this story, several of the Impact Team’s Web links were no longer responding.

“We’re not denying this happened,” Biderman said. “Like us or not, this is still a criminal act.”

Besides snippets of account data apparently sampled at random from among some 40 million users across ALM’s trio of properties, the hackers leaked maps of internal company servers, employee network account information, company bank account data and salary information.

The compromise comes less than two months after intruders stole and leaked online user data on millions of accounts from hookup site AdultFriendFinder.

While what people do in their own lives in terms of sexual activity is strictly their own business as long as nobody gets hurt it is pretty damned stupid to do it over the internet. Between the NSA Stasi, corporate data mining companies and criminal hackers it is bad enough to conduct normal business let alone to leave a trail of one’s kinky fetishes, sexual orientation and marital infidelity.

Divorce lawyers have to be clicking their heels over this story because business will soon be booming.