Re: Spam started...
Yeah lucky for me I actually checked and found I had an ancient very short yahoo address that came up positive (using checker sites). Worried what was going on (have visited plenty of dodge porn sites over the years but have never given a credit card) I decided to risk it (sadly forced to torrent it and even over tor with encrypted everything this is a risky way to get it) and and downloaded the first data dump (second is a website code dump well worth avoiding). I then proceeded to try to import it into mysql but quickly realized innodb is garbage for this purpose and would take a week. I then googled and figured out to use MariaDB with the Aria engine instead and the whole import took only a few hours even on my older hardware. After some fairly simple SQL querying (being a computer nerd (unlike Joe Q Public using excel as a db) has its advantages) I quickly figured out the data associated with my old email had nothing to do with me. Ashley Madison may be total scumbags business wise but their database was very logically organized which surprised me based on what I have seen with these webcraptastic companies. They must have hired decent contractors to organize it and then nobody to protect it. Also my ninja fgrep skills helped me determine no hits on me on in the credit card csvs either (really csvs huh?, wasn't worried but wanted to verify a data theft didn't happen years ago that I didn't realize). I actually closed the yahoo email account (used as a throw away in the early days) as soon as I saw the positive hit. Still so much happier now than at beginning of weekend (of course after wiping drive of all data including even the OS) . Yes it is a crime to download the data but its out there and I was going to be damned if the bad guys (or half the internet) knew something I didn't as pertaining to me at least.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
