Hamilton County, Chattanooga and other area government agencies are launching internal investigations after their email addresses turned up in a hacked database of user information for Ashley Madison, a website that helps connect cheating spouses.
A group of hackers on Tuesday released a database of more than 30 million names, addresses, email addresses, financial records and bedroom preferences, and the hackers released a second trove of data, including the emails of Ashley Madison’s CEO, Thursday afternoon.
The information dump included full names, passwords, street addresses, credit card information and internal data, security researchers told The Associated Press. They said the information released included details such as users’ height, weight and GPS coordinates, and that men outnumbered women on the service five to one.
A Times Free Press review of the information revealed nearly two dozen email addresses belonging to government employees in the area: 16 Tennessee Valley Authority employees, four Chattanooga city workers, two Hamilton County government staff members and one EPB worker.
Beyond Chattanooga, the database contained .gov email addresses for city workers across Tennessee and Georgia, as well as federal and state employees.