Ashley Madison, an online dating website that specifically targets people looking to have an affair, has been hacked by a group that calls itself Impact Team. A cache of data has been released by the Impact Team, including user profiles, company financial records, and "other proprietary information." The company's CEO, Noel Bilderman, confirmed with KrebsOnSecurity that they had been hacked, but did not speak about the extent of the breach.

The Impact Team claims to have a "complete set of profiles" from the Ashley Madison user database, though so far it appears to only have released a small number of them. The hackers seem to have taken umbrage at both the concept of the site—the site's slogan is "Life is short. Have an affair."—and also the site's "full delete" feature. Ashley Madison charges users $19 (£12) to completely erase their profile, but the hackers claim that the users' details aren't actually purged from the database.

Along with some user profiles, Impact Team also released some internal network maps, employee details and salary information, and company bank account data.

The Impact Team's demands are pretty simple:

    Avid Life Media [the owner of Ashley Madison] has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails. The other websites may stay online.

Established Men is another dating website owned by Avid Life Media. Instead of facilitating affairs, Established Men is all about connecting "attractive girls with successful and generous benefactors."

If Avid Life Media doesn't meet the hackers' demands, "we’ll release [all of the data] soon if Ashley Madison stays online. And with over 37 million members, mostly from the US and Canada, a significant percentage of the population is about to have a very bad day, including many rich and powerful people.”

Noel Bilderman, Avid Life Media's CEO, confirmed that a hack that occurred, but not the extent of the hackers' access to the company's various databases and systems. Speaking to KrebsOnSecurity, Bilderman said that the hack was probably an inside job: "We’re on the doorstep of [confirming] who we believe is the culprit, and unfortunately that may have triggered this mass publication. I’ve got their profile right in front of me, all their work credentials. It was definitely a person here that was not an employee but certainly had touched our technical services.”

Bilderman didn't say whether Avid Life Media would go ahead and shut down Ashley Madison and Established Men. Avid Life Media released an official statement on the hack this morning, though it was very thin on details. We'll update this story if Impact Team makes good on its threat and releases the entire database of 37 million users.

In May this year, Adult Friend Finder was breached, with sensitive data pertaining to 4 million users finding its way onto the Internet. Back in 2013, Cupid Media, which runs a number of online dating websites, was breached by hackers; 42 million plaintext passwords were released as a result.