Qld bureaucrats tied to cheat website hack

The Queensland government is investigating how at least 44 public service email addresses appeared in data that hackers claim was stolen from the cheating website Ashley Madison.

The email addresses include those belonging to a detective, a regional councillor and a government official who sits on a hospital review board.

Nationally, at least 800 government email accounts believed to be linked to users of the dating service appear in a cache of the files seen by AAP.

The hacker group, Impact Team, made good on a threat to post the information online by releasing the data on Wednesday to the dark web, which operates separately to the public internet and is only accessible through a special browser.

Official email addresses from the Brisbane, Moreton Bay, Redland Shire, Bundaberg and Cairns councils appear on the list.

Addresses belonging to corrective services staff appear the most, while the departments of health, police, justice, natural resources and emergency services also appear to have been implicated.

AAP is aware that Queensland government IT staff are conducting an investigation into how the email addresses ended up on the list.