User data stolen from the affair website Ashley Madison and released to the Internet is being called legitimate by security experts on Wednesday, the Huffington Post reports.

The Ashley Madison website is said to have as many as 37 million users. Almost 10 gigabytes (GB) of users' names, addresses, credit card numbers and emails were posted to the "dark web" late Tuesday night.

Troy Hunt, a developer and web security specialist who helps people who believe they have been involved in a data breach, said the information leaked from the Ashley Madison data breach is real.

"It's entirely reasonable to assume that this data is legitimate unless it can be proven to the contrary," Hunt said. 

Ashley Madison's former chief technology officer (CTO) Raja Bhatia said there is no evidence the data is authentic after he and international investigators researched the breach. Bhatia is now a consultant for Ashley Madison and said the data dump is "entirely fake." He added Ashley Madison has never stored credit card information, which is part of the leaked data posted to the dark web.

"It's not unusual for an organization to deny the legitimacy of a data breach. But it won't take long for that position to change if impacted customers continue to report evidence of their data turning up in it," Hunt said.

Brian Krebs, a former cybersecurity reporter at the Washington Post, said he is not sure if the data leak is real, but he has spoken to three individuals who informed him that their data was leaked out.

"There is every indication this dump is the real deal," Krebs wrote on his website.

The data leaked from the Ashley Madison database may not be as valuable as some may think. It is widely reported Ashley Madison did not verify email addresses of people that signed up for the website. This means people could have created fake profiles with fake names, such as a celebrity.

If the data breach is in fact the real thing, celebrities and politicians reputations could be damaged heavily. Even an ordinary individual would be in deep trouble if his spouse found out he was on a website that encourages affairs.