Life is short: get hacked. A bad day for cheaters.

So, a group of hackers calling themselves the Impact Team have followed up on their threat to release the personal information – including names, email addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers – of over 37 million users of the ‘have an affair’ web site Ashley Madison.

The hackers did this, they apparently claim, not because they have a problem with people cheating on their significant other, but because the service was offering a premium service that supposedly deleted your personal details from their system, and then kind of didn’t.

Our security team had a quick check and it looks like the data is online, and if actually forged/hoaxed, well, someone has gone to a lot of trouble to spoof 37 millions fake accounts, is all we can say.

Ashley Madison has condemned the attack, but has not yet confirmed the information leaked online is genuine. We later learned that a Guardian journalist who investigated Ashley Madison is in the leaked data, confirming the validity of the data.

It should be pointed out that if you are on the leaked list, you may not have actually set up an account there. At one point, Ashley Madison didn’t confirm their account details, with the result that lots of users set up spoof accounts – DonaldDuck@Disney.com, President@WhiteHouse.org etc – generating all the usual silliness and online trolling.

Of course, the chances are that many of these accounts are faked ‘legends’ (to use the spy-fi lingo), as not many people are going to sign up to a cheating site with their real details.

Whatever you think of the morality of cheating, there’s a lot of hurt coming out of this one.