Ashley Madison (website)
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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.
Controversy
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.
