Hackers Just Posted a Third Dump of Alleged Ashley Madison Data

Yesterday, the hackers who breached affair website Ashley Madison and its parent company Avid Life Media (ALM) dumped a huge 20GB archive of company source code, as well as the supposed emails of ALM’s CEO Noel Biderman.

However, that 13GB email file was corrupted, and security experts as well as journalists have been unable to open it.

Now, the hackers, who call themselves The Impact Team, have dumped those emails again.

This time, the compressed file is just over 19GB in size. It was uploaded to the same site that hosted the previous dumps.

In the second data dump, The Impact Team included a message directed at Biderman.

“Hey Noel, you can admit it’s real now,” the message read.

Avid Life Media has still not publicly confirmed the veracity of any of the leaked data, but security experts now believe it is legitimate (the company has also been attempting to assert its ownership over the data with DMCA takedown notices). It remains to be seen whether the new emails are indeed genuine.

A class action lawsuit in Canada looks like it will soon be filed against the company.

Earlier today, Motherboard conducted a Q&A with The Impact Team. The hackers said that they still possess “300GB of employee emails and docs from internal network. Tens of thousands of Ashley Madison user pictures. Some Ashley Madison user chats and messages.” If that data gets released, it'll make things even worse for users who were compromised—and even worse for Ashley Madison.

Update 8/22/15: Motherboard has accessed a partial archive of the latest dump, and the file does indeed contain a huge number of emails sent and received by Avid Life Media's CEO Noel Biderman.

Update 8/21/15: The Impact Team, the hackers who are releasing the data and claiming responsibility for the breach, gave an update: "No guarantees on further dumps. But this 7z is corrupted so maybe another noel email dump. 40GB uncompressed."