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The hack of Ashley Madison, a website that promotes extramarital hookups, took place in July.
But in recent days, the individuals behind it dumped personal and financial data on millions of users, including as many as 70,000 people in the Denver metro area, as estimated by the company earlier this year.
Yesterday, we shared links to sites allowing you to find out if your information had been compromised.
Now come revelations about the possible use of the service at Colorado taxpayers’ expense.
Metropolitan State University Computer Science Professor Steve Beaty shared with 7News his research into the data.
He discovered numerous e-mail addresses with logins for government entities on both the state and city levels.
A slew of school district e-mail addresses were represented as well.
Here’s a screen shot from the 7News report showing some of the partial addresses.
According to Beaty, the largest number of addresses from the data, which goes back to 2007, sported the standard “state.co.us” suffix.
Scoring second were addresses from the Jefferson County School District.
Jeffco wasn’t alone in this regard. Also represented were school districts in Aurora, Alamosa and La Junta, the station points out.
State departments turned up as well. Examples: the Colorado Department of Transportation and the Department of Corrections.
Just because users logged in with their work e-mail addresses doesn’t mean they were trolling for booty on company time. But the details divulged by Beaty certainly raises the possibility that taxpayer resources were burned by married Coloradans looking for a little strange on the side.
Here’s the 7News report.
Send your story tips to the author, Michael Roberts.
