Five years after the infamous hack of extramarital affairs hookup site Ashley Madison, the 32 million affected users of the site at the time are once again being targeted in a fresh wave of extortion scams.

The new “sextortion” attacks were detected and publicized Friday by Vade Secure threat analyst Damien Alexandre. They involve targets receiving emails threatening to share their Ashley Madison account details along with other embarrassing data with family and friends on social media and via email. Those behind the campaign demand payment in bitcoin – in some cases 0.1188 BTC ($1,102) — not to share the details.

The emails are highly targeted and include not only the targets’ names and banks but also their bank account numbers, telephone numbers, addresses and birthdays, as well as Ashley Madison site info such as their signup dates and answers to security questions.

The financial demand isn’t made in the email itself but via a password-protected PDF attachment to avoid detection by email filters. The PDF attachment also includes a QR Code in another bid to avoid detection by URL scanning.

So far Vade Secure has detected “several hundred examples of this extortion scam, primarily targeting users in the United States, Australia and India,” adding that “seeing that more than 32 million accounts were made public as a result of the Ashley Madison data breach, we expect to se, many more in the coming weeks.”

Sextortion is far from a new technique. with regular cases appearing. What is unique here is that the hackers go overboard in providing highly specific data to the users in an attempt to extort them. In one of the emails, those behind the attack go as far as leveraging previous purchases made by victims for “male assistance products,” saying “do the partners you find on AMadison know you have been using ‘chemical help’ to have a good time?’”

“This Ashley Madison extortion scam is a good example that a data breach is never one and done,” Vade Secure concluded. “In addition to being sold on the dark web, leaked data is almost always used to launch additional email-based attacks, including phishing and scams such as this one.”

Image: Ashley Madison