When hacker group Impact Team threatened administrators of the No. 1 cheating site Ashley Madison to shut down its facilities or risk having the information of close to 40 million users go public, cheaters around the world went numb.
Staying true to its promise, Impact Team dumped over 9 gigabytes' worth of data on the Internet with names, emails, addresses, and other information of AM's users for anyone to see Tuesday.
Paris-based data monitoring company CybelAngel mapped the location of users registered at the cheating site. In the Arab world, the country with highest number of users is apparently Saudi Arabia. There were 1,230 users registered with email accounts that end with .sa.
It isn't uncommon for expatriates to have such email accounts, indicating that they've used professional emails instead of personal ones that would probably have the common .com suffix, in order to keep partners from seeing that they've swayed.
Adultery in Saudi Arabia is punishable by death, but it is not yet clear if the authorities will act on the information available online, if it proves to be legitimate.
Almost 1,000 Moroccan emails, the second highest number of users in the Arab world, were linked to the cheating website that for so long boasted about having their users' privacy impeccably guarded.
Recently, a gay Reddit user from Saudi Arabia admitted that he'd used the website while in the United States to approach other gay people in the area. Homosexuality in Saudi Arabia, like adultery, will incur the death penalty. The user, fearing for his life, fled the country after the leak.
Al-Arabiya published a complete list of the Arab countries with AM users:
1. Saudi Arabia: 1230
2. Morocco : 999
3. Bahrain : 730
4. Jordan : 685
5. Lebanon : 359
6. United Arab Emirates : 301
7. Kuwait : 239
8. Egypt : 209
9. Tunisia : 173
10. Qatar : 53
11. Iraq : 33