That Time Ashley Madison Ruined All of Their Customer's Lives

on August 18 2015 a hacker group called the impact team released dozens of gigabytes of data through a torrent leaking the names of users of Ashley Madison the world's Premier cheating website over the next few days identities slowly drip fed to the public destroying families ruining marriages and even ending lives the website promised discretion but in the end all it gave was heartbreak and exposed a web of Deceit built into the system but who was The Mastermind behind the hack who orchestrated the breach and years later does it even matter this is the story of the Ashley Madison hack in the early days of online dating websites promised to use algorithms to curate your perfect match out of their list of users you had a bunch of weirdo middle-aged spokespeople promoting the science of dating all trying to get you to sign in and of course to spend throw down twenty to thirty dollars and you would become a VIP granting you access to message the person apparently of your dreams if they were real of course but we'll come back to that many people often men use dating websites to cheat on their spouses now infidelity is nothing new however these websites offer the level of anonymity the real world encounters couldn't really provide you can be whoever you want online and live out your fantasy through these websites but if you build your relationship on lies it's only a matter of time before the truth emerges enter Darren M Morgenstern and Noel biderman these entrepreneurs saw a trend in the dating market and like any good capitalist they exploited the hell out of it after all if people were gonna cheat using dating sites why not give them an exclusive space to do so without judgment as an early ad for the website said quote some of us will always find a way to have multiple partners in elegant in wording but completely accurate so on January 21st 2002 ashleymadison.com was launched and unlike its team competitors the website guarantees success or your money back yes your Fidelity was their failure but for men to qualify for that guarantee they have to sign up and stop buying credits all the dating websites have a flat fee to access more features and more potential Partners but Ashley Madison is run like a casino money must constantly flow in from suckers willing to make a bet women set up free profiles a message whomever they want without cost after all women are the commodity on the website but mail users have to purchase credits to start the conversation and if you want a real-time chat that costs even more Ashley Madison became a massive success with its questionable ethics and racy ad campaigns they knew what most people wanted out of online hookups something naughty discreet and of course short term while all dating apps today offer the same sort of things in the early 2000s this novelty attracted a lot of media attention and the founders quickly learned how to work the crowd for some of that good old free advertising in 2004 Morgan Stern hired a woman to use the sights and go out on multiple dates and secretly videotape them he then gave the video to the ABC News show Prime Time live for the mainstream public this was probably their first taste of Ashley Madison and the interviews went precisely as you thought they would go one man confessed to cheating only out of lust when the plant asked if he was being selfish he yelled hell yes but despite his desires he was in no rush to get divorced because he didn't want to lose his kids generally he and the other men confessed they felt empty and the Affairs simply filled that aching void Ashley Madison fulfilled their desires without having to face any consequence as real and raw as these interviews felt it was all just a giant marketing Ploy Ashley Madison made these conversations into literal Primetime TV fodder making a new segment into a long-form advertisement they spread the word and the word listened people are cheating and we're here to facilitate that cheating so come on in and cheat on your partner this of course made the mere existence of Ashley Madison just a huge controversy news anchors articles comedians everyone took a shot at the website Noah however saw the potential in that kind of negative attention because the very thing that made one group of people create a moral Panic made another group extremely curious but it took five years after the website launched for it to hit 1 million users if the company wanted those numbers to grow it would have to try new tactics and it was time for a Rebrand as well as a series of ads that would exploit that overly thirsty group of men the new campaign featured the now iconic slogan life is short have an affair it was plastered on billboards television and the internet this phrase would sear into the consciousness of the mid-2000s some people are outraged some people signed up immediately but no matter how you felt Ashley Madison became a morbid krsd lurking in the back of your mind critics from the website competition like Match.com and engage.com accused the business of profiting from deception and ruined marriages by the men happily engaged these haters saying quote we're just a platform no website or 30 second ad is going to convince anybody to cheat in 2009 the website saw a huge spike in male users after Father's Day and in females after Valentine's Day clearly Ashley Madison found its core audience and most of that was thanks to co-founder Noel biderman you see he became the website spokesman visiting all popular daytime TV shows generating even more hate and curiosity from the stay-at-home crowd Weidman didn't mind getting yelled at by Sean Hannity Dr Phil or the view audience he even had his wife by his side for some interviews discussing their successful and closed relationship while promoting Ashley Madison which is very interesting to do he didn't mind Fielding questions about their marriage or being put on the defense because the whole time it was just a press tour causing chaos with a successful goal of bringing in profits nothing was off limits for vitamin it could be Reckless it could be taboo and he would do it I mean it got to the point that even their failures were all depressed that they needed for instance in 2009 they tried to purchase streetcar ads in his hometown of Toronto where biderman offered up to 200 000 Canadian in addition to subsidizing every bus ticket with the advertisement by 50 Cents essentially who was giving money away it was an incredibly bold move which was turned down and when asked why they turned down such a lucrative offer the commissioner responded it's not about sexuality it's about cheating but of course this failure made for a great headline and of course other advertisers were not going to turn down such a lucrative offer although after taking the money many of them did regret it after facing pretty harsh public backlash this continued for a while essentially they were commissioning Billboards TV spots and even at one time they tried to purchase an ad for the Super Bowl they'd figured out their media cycle now they would make raunchy ads get some backlash have the spots pulled and then repeat but this was working incredibly well because realistically all the people who were signing up to a website with the express purpose written on the front to cheat on your partner the kind of people that are going to turn their nose up at raunchyard or care that it's been pulled from their favorite website no of course not so it was working completely as intended despite that it didn't stop them trying to Branch out into other weird markets for instance Noel kept trying to recruit mostly male clientele wherever they were attempting to buy jerseys for an Italian Basketball Club and an Australian rugby team bid to rename the stadium that would become the Meadowlands in New Jersey but the organization refused him instantly the same as when he tried to rename the Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix to vitamin it didn't matter if it rolled ran or flew he was going to try and slap a Ashley Madison logo on it and I guess you can't blame him for trying as the slogan says life is too short now considering how out there they were Noah wasn't particularly charismatic or very thoughtful on screen but he didn't really have to be the product spoke for itself its presence eclipsed him before he entered the room Ashley Madison the site for home Wreckers became a household name but soon it would be a name most wished that they could forget on July 12 2015 the staff of avid life media the parent company of Ashley Madison was greeted with an ominous and direct threat in their email set to the AC DC song Thunderstruck hacker group calling themselves the impact team left this chilling statement we have taken over all systems in your entire office and production domains all customer information databases source code repositories Financial records and emails next came the demands which were simple shutting down Ashley Madison will cost you but non-compliance will cost you more we will release all customer records profiles with all the customer secret sexual fancies nude pictures and conversations and credit card transactions real names addresses and employee documents and emails Avid life media will be liable for fraud and extreme harm to millions of users after the threat came the accusations Avid life media Alm also ran the dating website's Cougar Life man crunch swapper net the big and the Beautiful and established men which impact team called a prostitution human trafficking website for Richmond to pay for sex quote Trevor Alm CTO once said protection of personal information was his biggest critical success factor well forever welcome to your worst [ __ ] nightmare impact team were going to expose Ashley Madison and the other explicit dating websites clients as well as the staff if the whole operation didn't shut down and shut down now but of course former Ashley Madison users had nothing to fear right after all the site offered a full delete service members could have their information scrubbed in a race from the site for the very low low fee of just 19 US dollars but that wasn't the case users still had to pay with the credit card for the full delete service and doing so gave all their personal details that were still available in the system this lie that they told that would all be gone net the company 1.7 million dollars in cancellations in 2014 alone users who thought that they cheated maybe lived out some fantasies and walked away free from their digital sins were about to pay the ultimate penance the impact team set their deadline if Ashley Madison still existed within one month 30 days they would release the data usually most companies wouldn't give in to threats but the consequences behind this act were more far-reaching than most this was beyond simple threats Beyond identity theft millions of people's personal lives were on the line surely that must have shaken the executives to the core their entire business model was discretion after all you'd think that they'd take this very seriously and attempt to shut down the websites but of course that would be naive because you shouldn't expect much from anybody when greed is the only driving Factor reportedly bidenmann and his team weren't all that phased by the threats and as long as the sights were generating profits they weren't just going to shut them down so on July 19th the impact team tied of the naval gazing from the executives released a small amount of data just to prove that they weren't bluffing this included sensitive company documents and the alleged source code of alm's products Story made its way to the media leaking to the Cyber criminal reporter Brian Krebs in a 30-minute phone call with Noel Krebs confirmed the hack and shared the manifesto with the public Alm could no longer hide this problem vitamin reframed their position quote like us or not this is still a criminal act and he wasn't wrong but this wasn't about facts or the law and hiding behind this wasn't going to help anybody obviously whoever the hackers were had a moral issue with Alm and what they were doing and they were not going to back down and apparently Alm were just making too much money to care but for the users of any of these websites just imagine being them they were caught in a crossfire waiting every day for this situation to resolve itself not knowing when or if all their dirty laundry would be aired for the entire world but more importantly to the people who they willfully cheated on most of those profiles were just ordinary people who wanted Solace I guess outside of their marriage according to reports some were even high-ranking government officials maybe even a celebrity or two the media of course was drooling over the possibilities like a dog at the foot of the table waiting for scraps meanwhile Alm held its own investigation but still completely refused to give in everyone in this situation had their own agenda on August 18th this is when everything came crashing down impact team released a BitTorrent to a 10 gigabyte zip file onto the dark web you could only access the file using the Tor Network which is an open source software that enables Anonymous communication which is where the hackers issued their response quote we have explained the fraud the deceit and stupidity of Alm and their members now everyone gets to see their data too bad for Alm you promise secrecy but didn't deliver if this wasn't bad enough two days later impact team released another data dump this time over 13 gigs worth which contain more profiles and corporate emails from all the executives at Alm including vitamin it came with a very simple message time is up however the files luckily were corrupted and the media couldn't access them this hiccup though made the hackers more determined so they released a 90 gig zip file and a special message for Biden the following day hey Noel you can admit it's real now it didn't matter whether you weren't an active member anymore or still married as long as you signed up at one time your private info was there for anybody to download and some of the people combing through the data were out for blood so what do these profiles contain after downloading the torrent you could find full names emails passwords height weight addresses write down to GPS coordinates for over 36 million accounts only partial credit card data was available but that was hardly the point just as impact team alleged the full delete program didn't work and now internet Vigilantes poured over the data looking for the most prominent names to take down or to extort the most notable name at that time was reality star Josh Duggar known for his role on the TLC show 19 Kids and Counting his squeaky clean image was already destroyed following horrific sexual assault allegations and now the married falanda was in the Limelight again for having not only one but two canceled Ashley Madison accounts he was the perfect villain to be the face of this story his actions couldn't be excused and no one would dare defend this monster this opened the floodgates for every moral outrage activist on television and morning news shows everybody hated vitamin and now they had even more cause to Dogpile even biderman's own Affairs were exposed in the emails unsurprisingly even his marriage wasn't as stable as he claims which completely makes sense because what happily married man makes a website explicitly for married men to cheat so while biderman was run defense for the company and his own life others were running for theirs according to France 24 the hack contained 1 200 Saudi email addresses and in case you don't know Saudi Arabia punishes adultery with the death sentence other emails will link to U.S government officials and military personnel possibly putting them at risk for blackmail this hack became content fodder for anyone not on the list a radio show in Australia had a calling segment where listeners could request the DJ to find their spouses but for some members this game proved fatal on August 24th John Gibson a pastor in New Orleans was found dead by his wife he had taken his own life after the shame of being revealed on the list became too much to bear to other unconfirmed suicides were linked to the hack in Toronto some groups were scanning the email list and threatening to Blackmail the names they found demanding Bitcoin in exchange for silence all the hackers sent spam the Lord members in by promising to erase their names from the database when desperate users click the link they were floated with spyware and viruses impact teams celebrated their win as the world scrambled to exploit the story or to hide from it they even responded to an interview request from Vice when asked about the Ashley Madison Security they replied bad nobody was watching no security you could use past1234 from the internet to VPN to root on all servers impact team also admitted that the hack started years ago they just collected info waiting for the right time to strike and apparently they even had more data on hand at least 300 gigs in total of which less than 10 had been released thus far but the biggest question had yet to be asked why why would they take down so many others just to expose Ashley Madison and that's where an interesting reveal came in we were in Avid life media for a long time to understand and get everything finally we watched Ashley Madison sign ups growing and human trafficking on the sites we didn't blackmail users Avid life media blackmailed them Avid life media is like a drug dealer abusing addicts while the human trafficking allegations were troubling to say the least it was hard to establish and impact team didn't make an effort outside of that statement to do so but the hackers did admit to being employed by Alm at one point were they still there or was this the work of a disgruntled former employee this gave investigators something to work with and the call was coming from inside the house but we'll come back to that one later for now the question remained was Ashley Madison abusing their users according to a Gizmodo article out of the 37 million profiles leaked only 12 000 were active female users and the other 5.5 million female profiles were abandoned on almost immediately after their creation so were they even real remember Ashley Madison had a credit based system a man had to pay to message a woman that he wanted to speak with or to respond to so according to the article if you kept pumping money into the system you might eventually talk to somebody real but most men were paying to talk to automated replies from Bots and after they responded to the fake profiles they would be inundated with even more responses from even more fake accounts essentially once they got the hook into you and knew that you were trying to respond and pay money for this response they would bombard you with more responses which you would in turn pay more money for according to the emails Alm employees were responsible for creating these profiles known throughout the company as Angels the leaked emails also detailed alm's efforts to get Angel profiles up and running in multiple countries assigning the tasks to team members called profile builders bidemann contemplated Contracting with more companies to produce even more Angels there were even heavily internal discussions about making each profile seem as realistic as possible especially if users traveled from state to state when it came to the profile building Ashley Madison was strict on quality control while bidenmann desperately wanted to automate the process those results weren't up to par with a carefully handcrafted forgeries as the Gizmodo article points out the company engaged in a deliberate elaborate and multi-year campaign of fraud men around the world risked their relationships and open their wallets for a series of fembots ironically bidenman claimed in an interview with Bloomberg news that the site was aimed at women from the color scheme to the name but the information all spelled out the opposite the reaction to this was split you were either laughing or crying many felt anyone who joined the website had this humiliation coming and those who felt wronged by Ashley Madison wanted something or anything for their pain a class action suit in Canada was filed against Ashley Madison seeking damages but for the Canadian citizens to get compensation they would have to reveal their names so you'd have to be able to twice but this time in a court of law on August 24th Alm offered half a million dollars Canadian mind you as a bounty for information that would lead to the arrest of impact team the Toronto police joined the Manhunt along with the FBI in homeland security but with hackers hiding in plain sight you see impact team did confess to having worked at the company so it was just a matter of narrowing down who had access to what files and who had the biggest ax to grind back in July bidenman told the journalist Brian Krebs that he was sure the hack was an inside job quote I've got their profile right in front of me all their work credentials it was definitely a person here that was not an employee but certainly had touched our Technical Services this started the conspiracy theories flying prominent Tech Giant and certified lunatic John McAfee rip of course published an article concluding that the hacker was undoubtedly a woman his proof the use of the phrase cheating dirtbags real insightful stuff John but the vitamin and data scientist Jeremy Bullock believe the hacker was none other than a former SEO expert William Brewster Harrison emails showed dozens of hate-filled messages from Harrison and this former employee knew all of alm's Dirty Secrets Harrison was one of the many profile Builders at Alm so he also had access to the company's top secret materials but more than that he had a long history of lashing out against former employers online often creating websites to air his grievances oddly enough a year before he's forced departure one of Harrison's duties was to track down the owner of the spoof website Ashley Madison sucks.com As proved by the emails Harrison was given direct orders to harass the owner Dennis Bradshaw to sell the domain to Ashley Madison Harrison sent fraudulent emails to Bradshaw posing as his girlfriend he even docks Bradshaw's lawyer and loved ones on his website Harrison's tenacity and viciousness paid off and Bradshaw eventually sold a domain for ten thousand dollars to Alm of course the company kept the name and used it for marketing purposes bidenman loved the controversy of owning a website called Ashley Madison sucks.com and he also loved Harrison the terrifying nature of this employee but of course the feeling wasn't Mutual despite collecting a check from Alm Harrison considered himself a threat to Corporate America pending hip-hop anthems under the name Chaos dog in which he challenged Executives his feelings were very clear he hated the company he hated their lack systems and he hated his role in its outright deception and in November 2011 he was fired that's when things took a little bit of a nasty turn remember Harrison was an expert at SEO search engine optimization and when alm's Executives Google searched Spider-Man's name the autocomplete feature started adding the words Jew or Jewish as the first result and if you click the first page results you would be led to Stormfront the premier website for Nazis and fascists the website was filled with articles targeting bidenmann and his contribution to the decline of quote Western culture in early 2012 Harrison even leaked screenshots of the fake fenbots he helped create even worse he had access to the servers months after being fired no one even bothered to shut down his accounts or to change any passwords in one unhinged slur-ridden email Harrison wrote to bidenman quote just remember outsmarted you last time and will outsmart you and outmaneuver you this time too by keeping myself far far away from the action and just enjoying the sideline you cheering for the opposition We Are Legion a little bit of an Easter egg for anybody familiar with where that comes from Spider-Man however believed Harrison was behind the whole mess and all signs pointed to this angry and possibly racist employee he was sending hundreds of emails with veiled threats of cyber attacks and he made countless harassing phone calls to Alm Executives the company lawyers contacted the Toronto police and reported this Behavior Harrison was unstable tech savvy and dangerous but was he the hacker Brian Krebs followed up on the lead and found Harrison's family North Carolina when he contacted his mother for a comment she told him some unexpected truths first despite all the anti-semitic rhetoric surrounded Harrison he was in fact Jewish himself and second tragically he'd taken his life in 2014 nearly 16 months before the impact team hack I'm not sure he's your guy his mother dryly replied and she may have been right the most recent emails found were dated two weeks before the hack making it impossible but in early 2015 cyber intelligence film 471 Trace posts on the Russian cybercrime Forum anti-chat advertising 32 million Ashley Madison profiles for sale but the post by a user named brutium was removed and no evidence of a sale was found was this buyer impact team was brutium the actual hacker and did Harrison facilitate this act prior to his death to this day we still don't know impact team never resurfaced and their identities remain a complete mystery but none of that matters now the chaos the confusion the media frenzy that was the goal and for impact team it was a complete mission accomplished days after the hack Noel biderman was forced to resign and step down as CEO the ringleader of the circus was now gone and that 500 000 is still up for grabs but even if the leadership changed did Alm learn anything the FTC and various other government agencies investigated the company and found them liable for not taking preventative measures to protect their clients but as you'll tend to find with almost anything like this they will let off the hook with a little slap on the wrist paying a measly sum of 1.6 million dollars in 2017. all the Heartbreak the deception the fraud only led to a fine that was a fraction of their yearly profits and Ashley Madison remains online today with over 60 million users and Counting the only real victims with a broken hearted and those that trusted the website with their privacy some of which are no longer with us today but human nature hasn't changed and people will always be curious about the taboo and this is one of those rare cases where a massive hack happens and nobody even years later knows who was responsible for me my biggest question is did the hackers get what they wanted was this the desired outcome ruining so many lives and yet still seeing the website online years later still making money with nothing changing I'd like to say they wouldn't be happy with the outcome but just like their identity I guess we'll just never know

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Length: 29min 28sec (1768 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2023