Thousands of Harrogate men members of adultery website, Ashley Madison

Internet Hackers posted the full list of users of the website, which allows men and women to find other people to have affairs with, on the dark web earlier this week.

Figures show that there are more than 32 million users worldwide including 2,167 in Harrogate and Knaresborough and 1.206 in Ripon.

Around 90 per cent of users in the Harrogate District were men.

Website Ashley Madison, which has the tagline “Life is short. Have an affair”, was hacked last month by a group calling itself The Impact Team.

The hackers were said to be a protest over the site charging a leavers fee to users to completely delete all their data which the impact team said was never removed.

The company behind the controversial website has blasted the hackers actions as criminal.

It said: “The criminal, or criminals, involved in this act have appointed themselves as the moral judge, juror, and executioner, seeing fit to impose a personal notion of virtue on all of society.

“We will not sit idly by and allow these thieves to force their personal ideology on citizens around the world. We are continuing to fully co-operate with law enforcement to seek to hold the guilty parties accountable to the strictest measures of the law.”

Although the information was originally ‘dumped’ on the dark web it has since been posted on various blogs and websites. It has emerged that 134 .gov.uk email addresses had signed up to the site and websites offering to scour the database by email address have appeared online.

Along with names, sensitive date such a credit card payments dating back to 2008 were also released along with details include street addresses, email addresses and the amount users paid.