ABSTRACT
The hack of Ashley Madison's website put an indelible human face on the vulnerabilities of cybersecurity in a way few other incidents could. Ashley Madison's entire business model of infidelity depended on discretion and anonymity to protect users from embarrassing disclosure. The Impact Team, the name used by the hackers, targeted Ashley Madison on moral grounds, implicating the firm's business model for facilitating adultery. The lesson of Madison's story illustrates the importance of looking beyond a single cyber event to understand the dynamics within a firm that contribute to the root cause of a breach. Madison's hack was indicative of a failure of decision making. A national clearinghouse of cyberattack data is needed as part of a self-regulatory system to improve the response time for events with large-scale impact. A recent report by the US Department of Justice demonstrates the broad impact attributed to cyberattacks.
