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Ashley Madison's Korean web site on a computer screen in Seoul, South Korea. U.S. government employees with sensitive jobs in national security or law enforcement were among hundreds of federal workers found to be using government networks to access and pay membership fees to the cheating website Ashley Madison, The Associated Press has learned. The list includes at least two assistant U.S. attorneys, an information technology administrator in the White House’s support staff, a Justice Department investigator, a division chief, and a government hacker and counterterrorism employee at the Homeland Security Department. Others visited from networks operated by the Pentagon. Image Credit: AP

TORONTO: A major investor in infidelity website AshleyMadison.com’s parent company said the data breach of its systems was a concern for customers but would not affect his backing of the company.

The crisis engulfing Ashley Madison and parent Avid Life Media deepened on Thursday as lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit claiming $750 million (Dh2.8 billion) in damages from the release by hackers of customers’ emails stolen from the company.

On Friday, the hackers, who call themselves the Impact Team, told a technology website they have a massive trove of data including users’ photos, internal documents and emails they intend to release online.

Previous releases this week have contained millions of email addresses, including US government officials, UK civil servants and high-level executives at European and North America corporations, and emails by the company’s founder Noel Biderman.

“Our business is continuing normally,” said Phillip DeZwirek, who holds a 4.7 per cent stake in the private company, according to a list of major shareholders included in Tuesday’s data dump.

His son, Jason DeZwirek, owns 15 per cent, and the family’s investment company, Icarus Investment Corp, holds another 10.8 per cent, giving the DeZwireks and their related companies a 30.5 per cent stake in Avid Life Media.

Jason DeZwirek did not return a phone call seeking comment and efforts to reach Icarus by phone were unsuccessful.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Avid Media, Noel Biderman, has 9.1 per cent.

DeZwirek said he was not concerned about a potential material cost associated with either settling or fighting the class-action lawsuit.

“Class-action lawsuits are a part of the American way of life, and they have seeped slowly into Canada, it’s all just one general cesspool of greedy lawyers,” DeZwirek said.

“I happen to be a lawyer but not a greedy one. But that’s part of doing business in America, and apparently Canada.

“As an investor, I’d be more concerned with finding out who did this and having them punished by the criminal system,” he said.

Avid Life Media has employed a security guard to screen visitors to its midtown Toronto office, and employees leaving the office declined to comment when approached by Reuters on Friday.