Authors' note as of 8/25/2015 at 11:40 a.m. ET: One of the sites linked to in this post—Trustify—is embroiled in controversy surrounding how it has been contacting people whose emails are found in the Ashley Madison data dump, as well as how it encourages those people to then pay for its P.I. services. Rather than go into that here in this How To, we have detailed the entire debacle in a separate article that we encourage you to read.
Wait. Stop. Don't do this. Don't check these websites1.
Let's just all take a deep breath and reflect on what has become of us, as a people. A website was created so that married people could easily cheat on each other, and then a reported 40 million people signed up, and then angry hackers stole their data and released it to the world out of righteous vengeance. And now the moral crowd gathers to shame and condemn. To point fingers. To search for spouse's emails with breath clenched tight. This is the sad state of modern affairs (OK, yes, pun intended). This is the quiet desperation of the masses. This is the pathetic morass of our culture.
We should not play along. We should get off the ride. We should not search this database for our loved ones. We should take our kids to the water park. We should close our computers and walk out into the sunshine of late summer and feel the heat of our glorious life-sustaining superstar on our cheeks.
But if you're not going to do that, you can search through the data dumped last night by the hackers who hit Ashley Madison by visiting this site, which was launched yesterday by Trustify, an Internet investigation service that tailors to romantic suspicions. Or, if you prefer, you could use this tool. Or this one. All you have to do is enter an email, any email, and see if it was hacked. Finding the email on the list means yes, there was an Ashley Madison account tied to it. But, crucially, Ashley Madison never required email accounts to be verified, so if you find someone's email here it does not necessarily mean they set up an account for themselves. If you are already a subscriber to "have i been pwned," a site that alerts people if they have been breached, and you are able to verify the email address you are checking, then that site can also tell you.2
"We are getting about one customer search person second since this morning [via the app]," says Trustify's Danny Boice. Boice said regardless of what comes up, many of these customers end up booking a Trustify private investigator. "We are getting an even number of men who were using Ashley Madison coming to us to do damage assessment as we are spouses who suspect they are being cheated on."
When asked about the possibility of doubting significant others checking up on their companions using Trustify's new tool, Boice says "Trustify is in the business of finding the truth. We do this in an objective and un-biased way. We don't intervene in how or why people want the truth or answers, we simply use our investigative pool to provide them."
We checked a few emails we knew were among the stolen, and they came up using every tool linked above, so they appear to be legit.
But again, maybe don't check. No good can come of this.
1Updated on 8/19/2015 at 3:04 p.m. to Add additional sites that are offering the same service.
2 Updated on 8/19/2015 at 4:45 p.m. to clarify that only subscribers with verified email addresses can search the data on "have i been pwned."
