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SA govt officials, academics exposed by hack

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 24 Aug 2015
South African government officials have been exposed as users of cheating Web site Ashley Madison.
South African government officials have been exposed as users of cheating Web site Ashley Madison.

South African government officials, academics and police officers are among those exposed for using cheating Web site Ashley Madison.

The Sunday Times traced the credit card details and e-mail accounts of the over 70 000 South Africans whose personal details were exposed by hackers.

The report found over 600 Ashley Madison users had registered with South African government e-mail addresses and of these, five South African government officials regularly made payments and were recently active.

The newspaper says it verified the identity of a number of local users of the site but did not disclose any names.

The Ashley Madison slogan is "Life is short. Have an affair," and the site aims to facilitate extramarital relationships for users.

There are 172 e-mails registered to Eskom, 65 to the justice department and 158 associated with South African universities, according to Reddit.

City Press reports 57 academics from Stellenbosch University and 41 academics from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University were among those registered with the site.

City Press also found there were over 50 Telkom employees on the site, while SAPS and correctional services employees also made an appearance.

News broke in July that the extramarital affair site had been compromised by hacker group, Impact Team, which demanded the site be shut down or it would release the personal information of around 37 million users. Ashley Madison continued with business as usual, and hackers released the personal details of millions of global AshleyMadison.com users onto the Dark Web last week.

The Sunday Times says the info revealed by Impact Team shows active South African users have spent more than R300 000 on the international site.

The highest number of philanderers were revealed to be from Johannesburg, which has over 15 000 registered users. Cape Town came in second, with around 12 500 users, followed by around 10 000 in Pretoria and 6 300 in Durban.

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