The Ashley Madison cheating website is attracting hundreds of thousands of new members, following the hacking scandal that revealed private information belonging to millions of users.
‘Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated’, declared the spokesperson of Avid Life Media, the company that owns the cheating website.
In the last week, hundreds of thousands of users have registered on the dating website, including 87,596 women. In addition, more than 2.8 million messages were sent by female users across the platform. These numbers have been publicized most likely in response to a series of attacks in the media, where it was revealed that the overwhelming majority of the dating site users were actually men.
The ‘Washington Post’ recently broke the news that the company tried to attract male subscribers by creating fake female profiles. After analyzing data leaked by the hackers, they concluded that just 5 million of the 35 million member profiles on Ashley Madison actually belong to genuine women. Similarly, tech blog Gizmodo suggested that only 12, 000 female users check messages on the platform.
However, Avid Life Media insists that the male to female user ratio on the infidelity website was of 1.2 to 1 for the first semester of 2015. The disparity suggested by the leak comes from the fact that women aren’t required to pay in order to send men messages, so the hacked information showed fewer payments made by them, in spite of their greater presence.
Lately, the dating website that enables users to cheat on their significant others by finding new partners has been faced with legal troubles and negative publicity, ever since its user database has been compromised on August 18. As a result, on Friday it was announced that Chief Executive Officer Noel Biderman stepped down, by mutual agreement.
The hack led by a group called The Impact Team unveiled private data belonging to 32 million users, which included government officials from Ireland, U.K. and the U.S.
At least 2 members of the dating platform may have committed suicide due to the reveal, while others were extorted due to their cheating history. Most recently, 2 Canadian firms launched a $578 million class-action lawsuit against Ashley Madison, claiming it had failed in its mission to protect client data.
Avid Life Media has promised a $500, 000 reward for anyone willing to provide information related to the identity of the perpetrators. According to a security firm, 97 other websites have been attacked by Russian-language hackers since July, which implies that similar leaks may soon follow. However, this time stolen data will not include detailed accounts of sexual exploits, but login credentials that could be used for spamming.
Image Source: Stato Quotidiano
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