Ashley Madison (website)

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.