Two Canadian law firms have filed a £368 million lawsuit against the companies that run Ashley Madison after a hacker group’s data breach exposed some 39 million memberships of the adultery website.

Hackers first attacked the site about a month ago, threatening to release user data if the “deceitful” service didn’t shut down. The lawsuit targets Avid Dating Life and Avid Life Media. He had used Ashley Madison while studying in the US.

Kristina Bergman, principal with Ignition Partners, a venture capital firm that focuses on companies in infrastructure and data security, said while individuals and companies have become accustomed to data breaches, the Ashley Madison breach is focusing attention on security in a way other breaches haven’t.

The Ashley Madison web site is displayed on August 19, 2015 in London.

“It makes it personal in a way that all of the other hacks are not”, she said. He has never himself cheated on his wife of 13 years, he told the London Evening Standard in 2014, adding: “But if I woke up beside my wife and it was the 200th day we hadn’t been intimate with one another and it looked like nothing would change, I would cheat so fast”. “They had the privacy standards they’re expected to adhere to in order to safeguard people’s information”, Robins said.

Tendler is the chief exec of Fortscale Labs – which specialises in detecting cyberthreats through intelligence-driven Big Data analytics – previously noted that the initial data dump by hackers contained keys to a Windows domain.

The presence of both external and internal documents in a single release suggests that this was an “inside job” and that someone collected this data and released it in one batch, the argument goes.

“Now we’re talking about real life effect”, Harmer said.

“It is vigilante justice in the technology sphere that is completely ungoverned by any judicial or legal review or process or set of laws”, Bergman said.

“All that being said, I have but one question”, he said, “Has the pain finally moved the pendulum enough to create real action for building better security?”

“Security is a holistic approach”, he said.

“Ashley Madison could have learned a valuable lesson from Sony, the most high-profile victim of an e-mail hack in recent memory”, Mizrachi said.

However, the presence of an email address on the list is not proof that the owner of that address personally signed up for an account. “They probably filtered the database for recent log-ins”. Among accounts identified with gender, 86 per cent are male, 14 per cent female.

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