Many things became apparent after hackers from a group calling itself “The Impact Team” unloaded a massive leak of 37 million users from adultery website AshleyMadison.com on Aug. 18.
For one, more than 15,000 government workers—both state and federal—no doubt violated email terms of service when their official emails were linked to the website. So far, only two local government emails were found in the hack, both of them with the @santabarbaraca.gov domain.
It’s important to remember that emails found in the leak do not show that they were confirmed, but merely entered, according to Brian Krebs, an investigative journalist who runs the digital security blog, krebsonsecurity.com. This means that someone’s email could have been entered into the website without their knowledge.
We also learned that virtually none of America’s zip codes—approximately 43,000—were spared fallout from the Ashley Madison debacle, including cities in Santa Barbara County.
Tecnilogica, a Madrid-based digital agency, took the Ashley Madison data a little further and mapped the information according to zip code. What did they find? That more men had registered profiles to the cheating website than women.
Plotting gender information on a map dubbed “Malfideleco” (which means infidelity in Esperanto), zip codes in the U.S. tied to Ashley Madison were given either a yellow dot—indicating that less than 85 percent of users in that zip code are men—or a red, meaning that more than 85 percent of men in that city are Ashley Madison users.
The zip code with the highest percent of male users is a place called Irma and 100 percent of its users are men, according to the map.
Montecito came in second with 95 percent of its Ashley Madison users being male and Guadalupe came in third with 91 percent.
The county’s largest cities—Santa Maria and Santa Barbara—both clocked in at 87.3 and 85.8 percent of Ashley Madison users being male, respectively.
Only four zip codes in the county came in at less than 85 percent: Carr, Ellwood, Summerland, and Serena.
Also remember that this data does not indicate that most of the men in aforementioned zip codes are cheaters, just that most of the Ashley Madison users tied to the county are men. For the average computer user, most of the emails in the hack would be hard to trace to a specific person. But it’s a relatively simple task for a seasoned hacker, according to John McAfee, founder of McAfee anti-virus software.
“A good hacker can follow you all the way back to your real IP address in a few hours given enough information,” McAfee told the Sun.
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 3, 2015.