Thousands of government and military officials are among those who appear to have been exposed by the huge Ashley Madison data dump.

Hackers dropped a gigantic 10Gb file of information about users of the adultery dating website, sparking a scramble on the web to create a searchable database of all those named.

Sky News have reported they have seen the raw data, which features the names and addresses of users - mostly in the US but many in the UK.

The majority of the email addresses used are personal Hotmail or Gmail accounts, however there are lots who have used work-linked email accounts.

There are reports that 15,000 US military and government email addresses are registered on the database, including executives in high-level positions.

There are also email addresses linked to the White House and NASA, as well as the Vatican and the United Nations.

Others have found senior professors at top universities, with one Twitter user quipping: "I wonder how many professors right now are thanking God for tenure?"

A file showing a list of email addresses purportedly belonging to local and national government employees in the UK has also been circulating, which appears to include at least one senior civil servant.

Someone who claimed to have created a searchable database using the data saw their website crash within minutes, and it is still not functioning.