Shame

WARNING: This story is about suicide, please contact www.samaritans.org if you are affected by this.

James Paulson* was married with 2 children. His wife Davina* discovered his dead body at their home in September 2017.

Discreet.ly** is a light-hearted and easy to use website that promoted extra marital affairs. At the height of its popularity it had amassed a user database of 32 million. The company was founded upon the implicit idea you can have betrayal without consequence, security was one of its core values demonstrated by a ‘Trusted security award’.

In September 2017, Discreet.ly was hacked due to a mixture of poor security and weak user passwords. User accounts that Discreet.ly promised to delete were recovered by hackers due to not being completely removed.

Users were targeted with ransom messages “I am going to send messages to all of your friends and family members. Wondering how to prevent me from doing this?”

The hackers came good on their promise and exposed the names of millions of people who had signed up to the website regardless of money paid. Some users had never messaged anyone. A newspaper in Alabama printed all the names of the people from the region affected. Twitter profiles and Reddit threads were created solely devoted to publicly shaming the individuals listed.

6 days after the names were dumped on the dark web by the hackers James Paulson killed himself. 

This was not the only suicide linked to the breach as well as the countless divorces and families separated.

4 years on from the hack Discreet.ly had 22,000 new people joining the website every day.

* names have been changed
** company name changed