Ashley Madison Account Held by Pickens County Government Employee

Recently personal data from the adultery website Ashley Madison has been posted on the web, exposing names, email addresses, and phone numbers among other information, for approximately 37 million members of the website.  The data dump has been released about one month after the website’s parent company, Avid Life Media, confirmed there was a “criminal intrusion” into its system. The website provides a place for those seeking an extramarital affair.  

FetchYourNews.com realized one of the domains leaked with the hack belonged to pickenscountyga.gov.  An open records request was submitted to Pickens County on August 20th seeking names of county employees with an assigned email with this domain.  This information has not been released as of noon Monday August 24th.

However FYN did receive the following press release from the Pickens County Board of Commissioners this morning:

    The Board of Commissioners has been informed that one of its email addresses (pickenscountyga.gov) has been linked to the Ashley Madison information dump that has been referenced in recent news reports. We asked ETC to identify who this email address was assigned to, and they verbally informed us that it was assigned to an employee that is no longer working for the county. In fact, this person had left the county’s employment several months ago. At this time, it does not appear that any current county employee is implicated in the Ashley Madison information dump; however, if a current employee is later found to have used their county email account for the activities associated with the Ashley Madison website, that employee will be disciplined.

The story will be updated as new information becomes available.