PARSIPPANY — Tension has been high at Morris County, Parsippany, and Board of Education offices, and in many homes this week after hackers released lists of millions of email addresses that were used to access the Ashley Madison online dating site for married people.
The website, whose tag line is, “Life is short. Have an affair,” was hacked by a group called the Impact Team in June. Earlier this week, it exposed the names, email addresses, credit card numbers and sexual preferences of upwards of 37 million users of the site.
With the help of a forensic expert, Parsippany Focus did an analysis of the massive leak and found that hundreds of the site’s members worked or lived in Parsippany. While virtually all members used a personal email address to sign up, Parsippany Focus uncovered a few members who joined the site using their government issued email. One person used his County of Morris email address, another used a Parsippany Board of Education email, and another was a high ranking officer in the Parsippany Police Department with the email address Sxxxxxxx@parpolice.com (Parsippany Focus has made an editorial decision not to publish member names or full email addresses. Websites have popped up in recent days that allow a person to search whether a specific email is included in the leak). The Parsippany Police email account in question also links back to the officer’s home address when a simple Google search is done.
Parsippany Focus spoke with a member of law enforcement on background and was told that if a police investigation was ever being conducted on the Ashley Madison website, an official police email account would never be used to access the dating site.
Parsippany Focus was able to confirm that the Parsippany BOE employee was a former district principal, but has since taken a job in another district.
Aside from the one police officer who used his police issued email account, Parsippany Focus uncovered two other former Parsippany Police officers who were regular users of the site. Of the two, one was already retired from the force when he signed up for the dating site, but the other was an active member of the Parsippany Police department at the time, and evidence reveals that the officer accessed Ashley Madison from police department headquarters and paid nearly $200 to Ashley Madison in the days immediately after Hurricane Irene. Although the officer used a fictitious name on the website, credit card records show that the officer used 3339 Route 46 (Parsippany Police Department HQ) as his mailing address, and he was required to use his real name when he provided his credit card information.
In addition to government email addresses, 191 accounts were associated with a rutgers.edu account, 25 with a County College of Morris student account, and three with an email account provided by the Parsippany-Troy Hills School District.
Government employees were not the only users of the cheating website. Records show that literally hundreds of Parsippany residents paid upwards of thousands of dollars to connect with other cheaters. Not surprisingly, all Parsippany members who paid were male, except for one woman from Lake Hiawatha who was looking for a “discreet partner who isn’t a couch potato.”
