The Ashley Madison hack: everything you need to know – The Verge

Ashley Madison’s parent company has proposed a settlement with users exposed in data breach

2017-07-16T17:28:28-04:00

In 2015, Ashley Madison, adult dating site designed to facilitate discreet, extramarital affairs, reported that its user databases had been leaked, revealing the details of up to 37 million users. An anonymous user filed a class-action lawsuit against the site's parent company, Avid Life Media, alleging that it had failed to take "necessary and reasonable precautions" to protect its user data. On Friday, the company reached a tentative settlement with potential plaintiffs, to the tune of $11.2 million.

The settlement has to be reviewed by a judge, but if approved, Ruby Corp., formerly known as Avid Life, won't admit to any wrongdoing, and w …

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The FTC is investigating Ashley Madison

2016-07-05T11:21:25-04:00

Nearly one year after a security breach resulted in the leak of a massive amount of customer data, Ashley Madison is now being investigated by the US Federal Trade Commission. The company's new top executives - replacing those who exited after the tumultuous hack - confirmed the inquiry in an interview with Reuters. CEO Rob Segal isn't exactly sure what the FTC is focusing its probe on, but the leading theory is that it's tied to the website's use of "fembots" to artificially balance the male/female ratio. "That's a part of the ongoing process that we're going through," he told Reuters. "It's with the FTC right now."

A report commissioned b …

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Ashley Madison insists it’s not a scam

2015-08-31T09:46:07-04:00

Ashley Madison says that women do in fact use its website and are even continuing to sign up, rejecting an analysis last week that said only a few thousand women ever used the site to send a message. It says that during the first half of 2015, the ratio of paying male members to active female members was 1.2 to 1 (men have to pay to send messages on the site; women can use it for free), which suggests a much more vibrant network. Ashley Madison also says that women sent 2.8 million messages during the last week alone. While that figure doesn't refute Gizmodo's analysis, you'd expect those millions of messages to represent more than a few thou …

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Ashley Madison parent company CEO stepping down

2015-08-28T10:25:19-04:00

Noel Biderman, formerly CEO of Ashley Madison parent company Avid Life Media, is stepping down. Avid Life Media released the news in a short statement this morning. "This change is in the best interest of the company and allows us to continue to provide support to our members and dedicated employees," reads the statement. "We are steadfast in our commitment to our customer base." Until a new CEO is appointed, Avid Life Media will be run by "the existing senior management team."

The news comes slightly over a week after hackers posted information from tens of millions of profiles on Ashley Madison, which is aimed at men and women looking for …

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Ashley Madison facing another class action suit

2015-08-25T13:06:50-04:00

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An anonymous Ashley Madison user has filed a potential class action lawsuit against parent company Avid Life Media, alleging that the company failed to take "necessary and reasonable precautions" to prevent hackers from breaching the company's files and releasing millions of user profiles.

"John Doe," who filed the suit in a California district court late last week, claims to have signed up for the cheating-focused Ashley Madison dating service in 2012. He's attempting to file on behalf of any US resident who signed up for the service and had data leaked, accusing Ashley Madison of negligence and inflicting emotional distress among other ch …

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Ashley Madison CEO allegedly wanted to hack competitor after executive discovered security hole

2015-08-24T22:20:05-04:00

An internal email conversation from 2012 between Ashley Madison's CTO Raja Bhatia and Noel Biderman, the CEO of the site's parent company Avid Life Media, reveals that the duo might have hacked one of their competitors, writes Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security.

The conversation allegedly took place between January 2012 and July 7th, 2015 - less than two weeks before the hacker group Impact Team publicized their break-in on July 19th. The cache of emails leaked by Impact Team shows that Bhatia told his colleagues that he had found a security hole in Nerve.com, an online magazine about sex, relationships and culture that had also launched a dat …

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Ashley Madison owners promise $379,000 bounty for information about hackers

2015-08-24T12:12:30-04:00

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Avid Life Media is offering a CA$500,000 (around US$379,000) bounty for information on the hackers behind its massive security breach, which Toronto police now say could have resulted in two suicides. As reported by the BBC and Reuters, police acting staff superintendent Bryce Evans announced the bounty at a press conference this morning. Evans also said that the police had two unconfirmed reports of suicides tied to the leak of customers' account data, without giving more details.

"Today I can confirm that Avid Life Media is offering a $500,000 reward to anyone providing information that leads to the identification, arrest, and prosecution o …

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Criminals are already using the Ashley Madison leak for blackmail

2015-08-21T15:19:25-04:00

Online criminals aren't wasting any time taking advantage of this week's Ashley Madison data dump. Krebs on Security is reporting on one such scheme, noticed by an email provider in Milwaukee that found the following message being spammed to its subscribers:

Hello,

Unfortunately, your data was leaked in the recent hacking of Ashley Madison and I now have your information.

If you would like to prevent me from finding and sharing this information with your significant other send exactly 1.0000001 Bitcoins (approx. value $225 USD) to the following address:

1B8eH7HR87vbVbMzX4gk9nYyus3KnXs4Ez

Sending the wrong amount means I won't know it's yo …

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The second Ashley Madison leak is mostly source code

2015-08-20T21:16:15-04:00

When a second cache of data from the Ashley Madison hack was published earlier today, reporters rushed to download and sort through the contents, expecting internal data akin to the leak published earlier this week. But now that The Verge has spent some time looking through the data, it appears to be something significantly more innocuous, primarily detailing the backend operations of Avid Life Media's various web properties.

The bulk of the data is divided between 10 tgz or "tarball" files, along with a 7z mail archive file named for Avid Life Media CEO Noel Biderman.

For most observers, the email archive was the most tempting, promising …

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Ashley Madison hackers have posted more leaked data

2015-08-20T13:48:30-04:00

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The hackers behind this week's leak of Ashley Madison user data may have released more details, this time about the company itself. Motherboard first reported the new data and an accompanying message, which has been confirmed by The Verge. The torrent and message were posted on the same Quantum Magazine Tor site where the initial dump appeared "Hey Noel, you can admit it's real now," says a message signed by the hackers - a reference to parent company Avid Life Media's CEO Noel Biderman.

The new data includes up to 20GB of files, including a one folder titled "noel.biderman.mail," which could indicate that this release includes internal com …

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