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Ashley Madison hack: Sydney, Melbourne top list of accounts as Australian users revealed
By Liam Mannix
Sydney and Melbourne have apparently been revealed as a hotbed of affair activity, having among the highest number of Ashley Madison accounts, as fallout from the hack attack continues.
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In other revelations, more than 700 Australian government email addresses (.gov.au) apparently linked to Ashley Madison users have been posted online.
According to graphs published on data visualisation website dadaviz.com by its founder Jishai Evers, Sydney (251,813) and Melbourne (213,847) have the third and sixth highest number of active accounts.
Fairfax Media has not yet been able to verify that information, nor what Mr Evers has decided to class as an 'active' account.
However, it is worth noting that if those figures are correct, some 7.6 per cent of Sydney's 3.3 million-working-age population, and 7.1 per cent of Melbourne's 3 million working-age-population, have accounts. Given that the hackers say between 90 and 95 per cent of accounts on the database are male, if Mr Evers' numbers are correct then up to 15 per cent of the states' male populations would have an active account.
The figures comes from a leaked database spanning March 2008 until July 2015, and the accounts listed may no longer be active. People can also sign up for multiple accounts, which may inflate the figures.
Brisbane (118,857), in 14th place, was the only other Australian city in the top 15, although Perth (88,754) made the top 25.
Sydney and Melbourne top the listCredit: Jishai
Mr Evers also posted a range of revealing information that hints at the type of data contained within the huge databases, including graphs of the eye and hair colour and body shape of the hack's 37 million revealed users.
Lots of biographical information is included in the leaked databaseCredit: Jishai
The large file size and format of the hacked files means that accessing them in raw form requires intermediate computer experience, which has so far helped limit the spread of the data.
However, as more and more people download and open the file, and more searchable websites with the data spring up online, more user information is being revealed.
Several users with access to the data are answering requests in internet forums, and late on Wednesday one of them dumped the motherload of Australian government emails.
The 737 email addresses have apparently been compiled by a user searching for addresses ending in the .gov.au suffix.
They include university emails, emergency services, police, state justice departments, local councils, and military emails.
Fairfax Media has not been able to verify the legitimacy of the email addresses, or whether they actually come from the leak.
Importantly, Ashley Madison did not require users to confirm their email addresses when they signed up to the website, making it possible to use a fake email address to register.
However, users with access to the full database will be able to verify those emails and users by comparing the addresses to biographical, geographical and credit card details contained within the database.
Online users have also pointed to there being a field in the databases files that states whether a user's account is valid. Whether this means a user has confirmed their account as being real via their email address remains to be seen.
Intriguingly, one of the databases that has been leaked contains fields labelled "latitude" and "longtitute", which theoretically means it will be possible to geographically locate users.
Ashley Madison's initial sign up page asks users for their suburb and postcode.
Among the first email addresses released world wide were 22 addresses linked to the University of Western Sydney, as Fairfax Media reported on Wednesday.
with Ben Grubb