Office affairs: Hundreds of US government staffers used adultery website Ashley Madison at work

Hundreds of US government employees — including some with sensitive jobs in the White House, Congress and law enforcement agencies — used Internet connections in their federal offices to access and pay membership fees to the cheating website Ashley Madison.

Accounts exposed by hackers that could be traced back to federal workers included those of at least two assistant US attorneys; an information technology administrator in the Executive Office of the President; a division chief, an investigator and a trial attorney in the Justice Department; a government hacker at the Homeland Security Department and another DHS employee who indicated he worked on a US counterterrorism response team.

Few actually paid for their services with their government email accounts. But the Associated Press traced their government Internet connections — logged by the website over five years — and reviewed their credit-card transactions to identify them. They included workers at more than two dozen Obama administration agencies, including the departments of State, Defense, Justice, Energy, Treasury, Transportation and Homeland Security. Others came from House or Senate computer networks.

The government subscribers are not being named in this report because they are not elected officials or accused of a crime.

Hackers this week released detailed records on millions of people registered with the website one month after the break-in at Ashley Madison’s parent company, Toronto-based Avid Life Media Inc. The website — whose slogan is, “Life is short. Have an affair” — is marketed to facilitate extramarital affairs.

Many federal customers appeared to use non-government email addresses with handles such as “sexlessmarriage”, “soontobesingle” or “latinlovers”. Some Justice Department employees appeared to use pre-paid credit cards to help preserve their anonymity but connected to the service from their office computers.