You’ve probably now heard of Ashley Madison, a dating website set up explicitly for married people looking to have affairs. Fake messages from fake people. The emails are personalized and include information stolen in the Ashley Madison breach, including usernames and passwords, signup date, credit card details, bank account numbers, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and answers to security questions and answers. Whereas Ashley Madison boasts of a membership base of over 50 million users, 46.99% of them are from the USA. Ashley Madison is entirely free to use for women seeking men.
The site’s database was hacked, and personal details of their members were released to the public. Holden’s firm recently discovered that, indeed, several online dating sites have been compromised. Ashley Madison does not require e-mail verification, which means anyone can sign up with someone else’s e-mail address as part of a scam, prank or fear for their own security. In 2016, the site dedicated to helping people hack email and sites like ashley madison online gaming accounts known as suffered multiple data breaches.
The Privacy Commissioners also slammed ALM for its practice of retaining customer information, even after users had deleted or deactivated their accounts, some having paid for the privilege of doing so. A similar attack on AdultFriendFinder in March of this year resulted in the exposure of more than 3.5 million people’s dating and personal interests. What that means is that we have absolutely no data recording human activity at all in the Ashley Madison database dump from Impact Team.
According to database research from Gizmodo in August, of Ashley Madison’s roughly 37 million users, only 5.5 million were marked female.” But of that subsection, only a small percentage appeared to be active on the site – checking their messages, or using the site’s chat system, for example. With the hackers threatening to release the personal details and sexual fantasies of the site’s more than 37 million users, all eyes have been on Ashley Madison and its parent company, Avid Life Media.
As any self-respecting dating site, Ashley Madison also features a mobile app. Ashley Madison hired Ernst and Young to rebuild trust with those customers, said Buell, and to show how the company has reinvented itself from the ground up one day at a time,” focusing primarily on security and discretion. Avid Life Media previously tried to leverage the DMCA in July when the hack was first divulged. You can use the basic function to search names on Ashley Madison, which lets you filter by age, most recent profile activity, and physical distance.