Ashley Madison hack list: South African details

Impact Team, the hacking group behind the hack of Ashley Madison, has published the data it said it stole from the site’s servers.

The first 10GB release contained MySQL data dumps of member details, e-mail addresses, and credit card information.

A second dump of information was released later, which was 19GB, with the additional data taking aim at the company’s executives, according to reports.

We took a high-level look at which South Africans were compromised in the attack, without downloading the credit card dump.

Unfortunately, the “country code” field in the Ashley Madison member database did not have a single value for all South African users – making it difficult to get an accurate total.

However, it was possible to query the number of .za e-mail addresses used to register accounts (including .gov.za), as well as the South African cities and towns members said they were “looking for action” in.

Fewer South Africans on Ashley Madison than first thought

Htxt also reported on the stats they pulled from the Ashley Madison credit card table, revealing that 10,116 South African men paid to use the service between August 2008 and April 2015.

This number is much lower than the estimate Avid Life Media provided to The Times, which reported that as many 175,000 South Africans had signed up for Ashley Madison.

It was noted that user figures were based on transactions from South African banks, and excluded purchases made through PayPal.

Our own queries also suggest that the number of South Africans on Ashley Madison is much lower than initially thought.

Counting users in major centres revealed that 15,347 members said they were in Johannesburg, 12,560 in Cape Town, 10,237 in Pretoria, and 6,342 in Durban.