Difference between revisions of "Ashley Madison (website)"
(→Fake female accounts) |
|||
| Line 69: | Line 69: | ||
Recently, Ashley Madison has acknowledged that the majority of its female users are actually bots and claims to make an effort to limit them. Whether or not the employees at Ashley Madison are the ones created these accounts, and if they still do, is unknown. | Recently, Ashley Madison has acknowledged that the majority of its female users are actually bots and claims to make an effort to limit them. Whether or not the employees at Ashley Madison are the ones created these accounts, and if they still do, is unknown. | ||
| + | |||
| + | [[Category:2020New]] | ||
| + | [[Category:2020Object]] | ||
Revision as of 13:56, 17 March 2020
|
Ashley Madison is an online dating service founded by Darren Morgenstern in 2002. The service has been marketed directly to individuals seeking an affair and has committed to its specific audience by adopting the slogan "Life is short. Have an affair".
Ashley Madison has recently received attention due to a data breach that happened in 2015 in which a group of hackers known as "The Impact Team" reportedly stole all its customers' information. The hackers then threatened to release this information online, including customer names, emails, addresses, sexual fantasies/preferences, credit card information, and pictures, if the Ashley Madison company did not permanently shut down its website. Ashley Madison, calling the hackers' bluff, saw the first set of customer information leaked a week after their demand. A month later, with Ashley Madison still up and running, the rest of the website's customers unwillingly watched their information get leaked to websites like CheckAshleyMadison.com and popular data breach checker haveibeenpwned.com.
A few months after the data breach, Noel Biderman, CEO of the Ashley Madison parent company (Avid Life Media Inc.), stepped down.
Today, Ashley Madison is still up and running under the same slogan of "Life is short. Have an affair". In an interview from 2019, Chief Strategy Officer, Paul Keable, claimed that Ashley Madison continues to create affairs at a rate of up to one million per month.
Contents
Membership
Ashley Madison is a membership based website based in Canada. With more than 60 million users, the majority of Ashley Madison members are from the United States, Brazil, and Canada (in that order).
Country Bans
Though Ashley Madison is available in 53 countries, there have been countries who have chosen not to allow the dating service to be available to their citizens. For example, with plans to launch in Singapore, the Singapore Media Development Authority strictly declined the company to be allowed in the country, stating that it "promotes adultery" and thus, goes against the country's values. Thailand has also ensured that Ashley Madison would not be available within the country. The Philippines sought to block Ashley Madison on account of it "facilitating adultery", however, it grew relatively popular among citizens.
Membership Model
Unlike other popular online dating websites, Ashley Madison is based on credits rather than subscription. If a user would like to initiate a conversation, then the male must pay 8 credits in order to connect with the other (female) user. Once the conversation is initiated through credits, all chatting and follow-up messages between the users are free.
Ashley Madison also provides a feature that would allow you to delete your account for a fee of $19. Though you can "hide" your account for free, deleting your profile claims to ensure that the user profiles, messages sent/received, photos, etc. would all be removed. However, the Ashley Madison data breach in 2015 showed that although users paid the fee to delete their profile, all of the information was still fully recoverable and therefore leaked along with the rest of the Ashley Madison members.
Data breach
In July 2015, a group of hackers broke into the Ashley Madison database and stole all of its users' information. The hackers then demanded that Ashley Madison would shut down all of its operations, else they would leak this information. In August 2015, the hackers leaked approximately 25 gigabytes worth of Ashley Madison data.
Hackers
The group of hackers identified collectively as "The Impact Team". At the time of the attack, the hackers left a message with their demands on the Ashley Madison staffers PCs while also leaving the popular AC/DC song "Thunderstruck" to play in the background.
Though none of the group has been properly identified, an investigative computer security journalist named Brian Krebs believes he has linked the attacked to Twitter user Deuszu. Brian Krebs found that a day before the actual attacks, Deuszu tweeted a copy of the Impact Team's statement aimed for Ashley Madison. Other tweets from Deuszu brag about hacking into various cameras, routers, printers, and websites. Though it is completely possible that this user is linked to the Ashley Madison data breach, the user has still yet to be properly identified and/or located.
Response
At the time of the initial attack, the parent company of Ashley Madison, Avid Life Media., released a statement regarding their investigation into the data breach. As the second data leak occurs and still no information on the hackers arises, Avid Life offered a $500,000 dollar reward for potential information regarding the attack. In August 2015 CEO of Avid Life Media, Noel Biderman resigns with a statement from Avid Life Media claiming the resignation to be within the best interest of the company.
Following the data dumps, Toronto police reported that two suicides were linked to the attack as their identities were amongst those leaked from Ashley Madison.
High profile users
From the television show "19 Kids and Counting", Josh Duggar is amongst one of the more popular names found on Ashley Madison. It was revealed that Duggar spent a total of $986.76 on the online dating site for two separate subscriptions between 2013 and 2015. In response to being outed, Duggar released a statement saying, "I am so ashamed of the double life that I have been living and am grieved for the hurt, pain and disgrace my sin has caused my wife and family, and most of all Jesus and all those who profess faith in Him."
Florida State attorney Jeff Ashton, prosecutor for the infamous Casey Anthony murder trial, found his name in the news again as the world learned of his activity on Ashley Madison. Jeff Ashton confessed to owning the account and released a statement reading, “I hope the public will judge me on my 35 years of service, and not a bad mistake”.
Jason Doré is one of many politicians who found themselves exposed as Ashley Madison members. As a Louisiana GOP official, Jason Doré claims that he did not use his membership for the purpose of an affair, rather, he claims that the account was dedicated to researching his political opponents. Whether or not that is true is unknown.
Controversy and ethical implications
Target audience
Ashley Madison has been subject to wide-spread controversy due to its services being targeted specifically to those who are seeking out affairs.
In an interview, Chief Strategy Officer Paul Keable claims that Ashley Madison is a force for good rather than a trope for infidelity. In an interview Keable claims , "A lot of members are happy with their husbands and wives in general. But there's something missing from an intimacy standpoint that they're unwilling to live without. They're told live without it or get a divorce—we offer a third path".
Paul Keable maintains that Ashley Madison has gained approximately 32 million new users since the hack, a fact he uses to prove the website's legitimacy.
Fake female accounts
At the time of the database attacks, there was approximately 5.5 million female accounts compared to the 31 million that belonged to males.
A former employee of Ashley Madison sued the company for "repetitive stress injury" as she claims that she was tasked with creating hundreds of fake female profiles designed to attract the male-dominated website. An analysis of IP-addresses and e-mails associated with different accounts showed patterns that would suggest the vast majority of female accounts on Ashley Madison were created from the same network. To further support the theory that there are fake female accounts, there are about 1,500 female accounts who have checked the messages in their accounts at least once (thus, making them "real" accounts). In comparison, there are approximately 20 million male users who have checked their messages at least once.
Recently, Ashley Madison has acknowledged that the majority of its female users are actually bots and claims to make an effort to limit them. Whether or not the employees at Ashley Madison are the ones created these accounts, and if they still do, is unknown.
