'Suicides' over Ashley Madison hack | Hacker News Reader

'Suicides' over Ashley Madison hack

bbc.com

76 pointsneokya75 comments

30 million people. How many suicides would be normal on a given day anyway? A few have probably dropped dead of heart attacks and strokes too.

Globally, 16 suicides/100000 people/year. So the 30 million people should have 4800 suicides in a year, or 13 per day. But these two deaths are restricted to Canada which has a lower suicide rate than the global average, and we don't know what portion of the 30 million are Canadian, so we don't have enough data to make a guess.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/08/19/ashley-madison-hack-... mentions an estimate of 273,000.

That's about 1% of 30 million, or about 0.1/day, or 3 weeks for those 2 suicides. I bet any deviation from the average isn't statistically significant (in fact, for 2 suicides, ¿almost? no 'background' suicide level will be statistically significant)

On the other hand, I do expect that Canadian police didn't base their claim on nothing. Chances are they found suicide notes, or something similar.

”didn’t base their claim on nothing”

Actually, they didn’t claim anything, and only talked about unconfirmed reports (https://twitter.com/TorontoPolice/status/635816932474814464, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ashley-madison-hack-2-...)

Probably a lot less since whole Canada is inhabited by only 35 million.

But it was a Canadian based company so there may be quite a few Canadians in there. Also see: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ashley-madison-says-1-in-5-o...

The current suicide rate in the US is about 12 per 100,000 per year, so that translates to about 10 per day among a population of 30 million. Assuming, of course, that the risk factors among that population match up with that of the entire US population, which they probably don't.

They are probably worse. AM users were predominantly male, which I believe increases the likelihood of suicide.

We tell little boys that "Big boys don't cry". Then wonder why so many men in their 20s kill themselves instead of seeking professional help. :(

Help seeking is definitely part of the problem. UK charity "The Campaign Against Living Miserably"[1] and Australian charity(?) "Soften The Fck Up" both campaign to make it easier for men to talk about mental health and to seek help. UK charity "Time to Change" has a number of campaigns to destigmatise mental health, some of which are targeted at men.

But in the UK there has been a rise in rate of suicide amoung people already known to MH services, so we need to be a bit careful not to put all the "blame" on help seeking behaviours.

(I'm interested in other anti-stigma organisations, where ever they're based and whatever demographic they target.)

[1] Calmzone is currently banned from Facebook. I don't know why. https://www.thecalmzone.net/

http://softenthefckup.com.au/ -- they don't censor the word on the website.

http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/

There is a huge stigma around seeking professional help. It can and does cost people there job and sometimes career.

Not to mention it tends to be rather expensive and of limited value.

I think it has more to do with the method than the act. Men are more likely to have guns, which work very well. Women are less likely to have access to guns and so survive more suicide attempts (pills, jumping off things etc).

Same for the military. The 'success rate' for military suicides is higher partially because of ready access to the means.

Which does nothing to explain the similar ratio in say England where access to guns is very restricted.

"Jumping off things" would be "falls and fracture", and it's not a common method for completed suicide. About 4% of registered deaths are "jumping off things". Drowning is a bit more, about 4%. Poisoning is about 20% and hanging, strangulation and suffocation is about 56%. (The rest has the unhelpful title of "other". I'm not sure what that means.)

> Which does nothing to explain the similar ratio in say England where access to guns is very restricted.

Drive a car fast. Just a lethal. Sometimes you hear about car accidents with only one car involved and the young male driver was the only fatality. Sometimes it's an accident. Sometimes it's someone ending it all.

Yes, the suicide rate for men in the US is over 20 per 100,000, while for women it's about 5.5.

Is that due to the much higher success(?) rate among males vs females? What are the "attempts" per 100,000?

Statistically, females are more likely to self-harm in non-lethal ways. This acts as suicide prevention, in a way, since it triggers responses from the environment and reduces the likelihood of worst outcomes.

Males don't self-harm and overall don't signal their discomfort until it's too late.

According to this web site (accuracy unknown), women attempt suicide at a rate 3x that of men:

http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html

This PDF says that there are 25 attempts for every suicide:

http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/Suicide_DataSheet-...

I had no idea it was that high!

In England (or maybe the UK) the rate of death by suicide for men is 17.2 per 100,000 population. For women it's 4.6 per 100,000 population.

(This is from office for national statistics data)

I think the problem of testing for randomness of these suicides is harder to solve than it seems. Randomness only occurs in the absence of suicide letters which state that the leak caused them to do it. At least two scenarios:

1. They leave suicide notes where they explicitly attribute it to the hack. Then, the probability that it is due to the Ashley Madison hack becomes = 1. The question then becomes, did the 'outing' push them over the edge. Especially so, if they attribute taking their life to multiple reasons.

2. If it is not attributed to the 'outing', then one has to carefully see what the probabilities of suicide are in their particular cross-section of population and also consider other risk factors. The numbers someone else quoted here, 16/100,000 is an average. It is fallacious to assume that this number uniformly applicable to the population as a whole. You have to consider prior probabilities for each individual. These priors can possibly be computed based on the individual's medical history, socio-economic background, geographical location, etc. with importance assigned in that order. I would imagine medical conditions would play a big role. For example, if an 'outed' person with no history of depression, etc. from a hyper-religious family commits suicide, it is quite likely that it was because of the 'outing' in the absence of explicit attribution in a suicide letter, etc. If a person has on his/her history previous suicide attempts, depression, etc. the marginal probability that it was solely due to the Ashley Madison outing would probably be lower.

Yeah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

Yeah, except in this case I believe this is a number released by the police and is likely based on evidence learned at each suicide. Notes left behind or information from people close to the now deceased, it's safe to say these two deaths have been attributed to the impact the leak had on their lives.

Also keep in mind we're talking about 30mil people in a particular population group, age range, that probably lives a stressful life (and possibly guilt)

> two unconfirmed reports of suicides

Maybe we should wait until we have some kind of confirmation before discussing this?

From the story:

    Two Ashley Madison clients are reported to have taken
    their lives after hackers published their details 
    according to police in Canada.

While police certainly can make mistakes and even tell lies, this sounds like confirmation to me.

Yes now it does, article was edited since my first comment.

I imagine it will be next to impossible to conclusively prove that AM was the reason for the suicides, so the best anyone can say is that the two events coincided.

If they left notes behind, it's pretty conclusive.

I'm sure it didn't help either.

It is crystal clear that Mainstream media has been chomping at the bit to release the "fallout of the AM hacks" type story. These stories generate clicks - whether true or not.

But by then the news cycle may be over! Gotta get in before the deadline.

This topic is touched on in the Krebs article released today (which includes information from the Toronto PD press release), in that the Toronto PD are investigating...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10110649

The breach was "very sophisticated", said Detective Menard from the technological crime unit of Toronto Police.

Bets on whether the "sophisticated" attack turned out to be a run-of-the-mill employee phishing e-mail or a brute force attack on an unsecured server with root login?

"Very sophisticated" simply means the responding officers didn't immediately understand the attack. That isn't a very high bar imho.

Or the officers are preparing an early excuse for not being able to apprehend the criminals later on. Which is a likely outcome considering the track record of these types of non-financially motivated attacks recently.

The hacking part tends to be easy. Especially for soft targets like a dating site.

The hard part is:

- exfiltrating large amounts of data without detection

- not getting caught afterwards

I am no lawyer, however I suspect we have a few on this site.

Does a suicide potentially move this from willful civil negligence into the realm of criminal negligence? Nonfeasance?

If you mean would Ashley Madison be criminally negligent for allowing themselves to get hacked, the answer is pretty clearly no. There's a very high standard for criminal negligence. Your conduct has to "grossly deviate" from normal conduct, usually showing a great disregard for human life. We don't want to be locking people up for every poor business choice or bad decision.

We could, and this is just a suggestion, look at the people who actually conducted the hack.

Leaving my doors and windows open is stupid but not an invitation to go rummaging thru my stuff.

Interesting analogy, what about this:

Your friends pay you money to permanently dispose of the evidence of their marital affair

You just leave the evidence at your house instead

You leave your doors and windows open

Now its still not your fault that people came in and rummaged through your stuff; but surely its you who are to blame for never disposing of the evidence as you promised (and accepted payment for)?

Its an interesting component to what is otherwise extremely simple.

If i paid a document shredding company to shred my documents and months later that company gets broken into and all my documents are released...

Surely i blame the shredding company as much, if not more, than i blame the thieves.

I don't really have a position or idea on what this all makes ashley madison guilty of from a criminal or civil law perspective - but i certainly feel that there are punishable actions taken by ashley madison in this whole mess

Your addition to the analogy doesn't really change anything, unless I made an absolute guarantee to either 1) immediately destroy the information or 2) destroy said information within a given timeframe and failed to do so.

Both of those are separate issues from leaving the information laying about.

In the original case, I might be stupid, but the interlopers are wrong to assume that they had an invitation to stuff laying about. They are, in fact, burglars.

Even with your addition, they are still burglars. However, I am liable for either 1) failing to destroy said information/stuff and/or 2) failing to do so within the specified timeframe, if the burglary happened after that timeframe.

The blame to the burglars remains the same in either case.

Honestly, I'm sort of enjoying a fat cuppa shadenfreude tempered by the knowledge that it is, for the most part, really none of my damn business what someone else does with their naughty bits.

Their conduct absolutely "grossly deviated" from normal conduct. They falsely advertised data deletion services, for one thing.

It'd be hard to argue that it conduct that disregarded human life, though.

No, it didn't. Their conduct was bad, and absolutely typical for the industry.

If pretending to delete data is typical for the industry, then we can't know for sure unless a company is breached or an employee leaks the info. It would be very easy to sue a company for lying about that.

You may be right that many companies behave this way, but they at least pretend that they don't. The companies I've worked for have always been extremely conscientious about honoring data-related terms, even if no user would ever know. The fear of getting sued is strong.

Probably not: most of these companies have user agreements drafted by actual lawyers, and those agreements are binding.

In any case: when I say that Avid Life is nowhere near the bottom quartile for companies when it comes to security, you can take that to the bank. Or, don't, if you're worried about taking things to places that won't lose your data in a breach. I guess you can take your data to Facebook in that case.

Snapchat didn't even delete the pictures, to start with. They just made them unavailable to the interface. Which is similar, and maybe enough.

Given backups and billing records and stored message histories and so on, its not really a question of 'deleting an account'. More like 'making an account no longer visible/available to the current interface'. Nobody thought they'd wipe any disks or anything, in anticipation of a big data breach, right?

This is important. The only reason this is much of a story at all is that the "affair" angle makes for very marketable stories. Otherwise this is strictly dog bites man.

> We don't want to be locking people up for every poor business choice or bad decision.

Whilst that is true, we equally don't want to be completely ruling it out. An investigation should be conducted regarding the actual attack, and perhaps their handling of the leak. Did they even notify all users?

Also not a lawyer, but... Was there suspicion that Ashley Madison had been wilfully negligent in the first place? It has sounded to me like the leaked data indicated they actually followed reasonable security practices. Strong password hashing, separation of different types of data, etc. Yes, they got hacked, but it's virtually impossible to guarantee immunity from target attacks.

edit: also, as others have implied, 2 suicides out of 40 million is not that high (I don't mean to downplay the tragedy - all suicides are horrible) - but IMO you'd have a hard time proving the Ashley Madison hack was really the only cause, and not the final straw for somebody who was already in a bad place mentally. If I were to tell someone that their spouse was cheating, and their spouse commits suicide, would I be criminally negligent?

Practically every system I've built at scale uses soft-deletes. A flag is put into the database and records that are deleted are excluded via that flag.

Note that I'm not playing with people's identities, but even then, you have to ask whether they were paying to delete the availability of their user data or the actual database records (somewhere in the contract?).

I think they should be clear about whether the information is still stored, true. But I also do sympathize with AM in this situation. I'm sure many of us have had the experience of going out of our way to secure someone's system for them, and then being asked years later if we can help them when they've locked themselves out. I'd be willing to bet there were more than a few people who paid to have their accounts deleted and came back at a future date and wanted to pick up where they left off.

I've dealt with PII, and soft-deletes are explicitly disallowed. But I work in an industry where "delete" is something to be very carefully defined.

Their overall security procedures may have been good, but at the very least the fact that they charged money for permanent deletion of data and then didn't actually permanently delete data ought to qualify. People who just signed up may not have a case, but anyone who "deleted" their account does.

I've been waiting to see some educated thought on this but it's been pretty absent from the coverage I've seen. Specifically also, I'm curious to understand how not deleting information people apparently paid to have deleted fails to constitute fraud... though successfully arguing negligence would be even more interesting for infosec in the software industry long term.

With the news of AM possibly hacking a competitor, this gets even more interesting, from the legal perspective.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/08/leaked-ashleymadison-emai...

If I have a crappy front door and someone breaks into my house and falls down the staircase, am I criminally negligent because I didn't have a baby gate?

Depends. IANAL, but this answer helped me when I had the same question as you. http://qr.ae/RF23mz

When did this even drift into civil negligence?

Even if they aren't directly related, I hope some people will at least take pause about the spread and analysis of people's private, leaked information. Sure they're kinda scummy but it is their private lives.

That is quite some money they're offering for a hack that didn't happen. Or did they acknowledge in the meantime, I haven't really followed these news.

They have acknowledged.

"Life is short, have an affair." Apparently, those affairs made life a lot shorter. The irony of a tag line.

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