Avid Life, the company behind the dating website, Ashley Madison, that was hacked yesterday, has claimed that it has managed to get all published versions of its members list pulled from the internet.

Ashley Madison is a website dedicated to people looking for extra-marital affairs and hackers calling themselves The Impact Team stole large caches of data, including the site's user databases of 37 million members worldwide. Parts of which were then published online in order to expose the "cheating" members.

As well as snippets of user information, the hacking group released employee data, including network account information, company bank account records and salary information. It threatened to release more information, including users' full names and addresses, if Ashley Madison and sister site Established Men were not taken down permanently.

"Avid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails. The other websites may stay online," read The Impact Team's demands.

It also said that it would have no remorse over releasing members details as they were "cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion."

Avid Life has responded by hiring a crack team of IT experts, it claims.

"Following the earlier unprovoked and criminal intrusion into our system, Avid Life Media immediately engaged one of the world's top IT security teams to take every possible step toward mitigating the attack," it said in a statement.

"Using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, our team has now successfully removed the all posts related to this incident as well as all personally identifiable information about our users published online.

"Our team of forensics experts and security professionals, in addition to law enforcement, are continuing to investigate this incident and we will continue to provide updates as they become available."

So users might be able to sleep a little happier tonight, although the likelihood of the Impact Team's threat going away completely are slim. So if you're worried that your off-the-books fiddle could be found out, best keep your significant other away from the computer for a few days.

UPDATE: Avid Life has confirmed it secured all sites and closed the unauthorized access points. It is currently working with law enforcement to investigate this criminal act of "cyber-terrorism".