VA Doesn't Acknowledge Department Emails on Ashley Madison Site

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More than 100 Veterans Affairs Department employees may have signed up for the adultery match-up site Ashley Madison using their work email addresses, but the VA is not saying whether it plans to do anything about it.

"The vast majority of VA's 330,000 employees are hardworking and dedicated to our mission of serving veterans," spokesman James Hutton said in response to Military.com's request for comment.

According to a list of the hacked domains posted on the website pastbin.com, 104 email addresses belong to "va.gov."

The number is much smaller than the tens of thousands of military email addresses -- ending in ".mil" -- and which Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said are now being investigated by the services. Carter told reporters on Wednesday those found to have used the adultery website could face disciplinary action.

"Of course it's an issue because conduct is very important" to good order and discipline in the military, he said.

A group identifying itself as Team Impact, which claimed in July to have hacked AshleyMadison.com of account profile and personal information, financial records and more on about 37 million users, released the data on Tuesday, Wired first reported.

Ashley Madison -- whose slogan is "Life is Short. Have an Affair" -- on Tuesday condemned the hacking and data release, calling it an attempt at moral vigilantism.

"This event is not an act of hacktivism, it is an act of criminality," the company said in a statement posted to its website.

So far, the .va and .mil data posted to the pastbin.com site include only the number of emails linked to AshleyMadison.com from those domains. Elsewher,e the pastebin site includes entire email addresses, including those purporting to belong to people at Boeing, Harvard and Yale universities and the Vatican.

According to an unofficial analysis, the hacked military accounts include 6,788 email addresses ending in "army.mil," 1,665 ending in "navy.mil," 809 ending in "usmc.mil" and 206 addresses ending in the newer domain "mail.mil."

-- Richard Sisk, Amy Bushatz and Brendan McGarry contributed to this report

-- Bryant Jordan can be reached at bryant.jordan@military.com.

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