Ashley Madison (cheating / affair website) hacked

[Resolute 14]

Looks like up to eight separate class action lawsuits have been filed in the US:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repor...ticle26090077/

I would guess those all get consolidated at some point.

[Wormius]

Okay. So weird, apparently one of my throw away email addresses is on the list, but when I do the password recovery on AM to see what's there, I don't get a password sent to my email address?

[Fighting Banana Slug]

Originally Posted by photon

Evidence that the number of real women on the site was vanishingly small?

http://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-th...ase-1725558944

Everyone should read the link. It is fascinating stuff.

[sureLoss]

McAfee claims that the evidence points to the hacker being a female employee of Ashley Madison

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/john-mcafee...-media-1516833

[jayswin]

Originally Posted by photon

Evidence that the number of real women on the site was vanishingly small?

http://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-th...ase-1725558944

Wow, 37 million users, and looking like about 12000 were actual human female members.

So it was 37 million guys fighting for basically.......no one.

[Krovikan]

Originally Posted by jayswin

Wow, 37 million users, and looking like about 12000 were actual human female members.

So it was 37 million guys fighting for basically.......no one.

At least 1/2 the accounts in the dump are duplicates, AM seems to have a massive data integrity issue in there db.

Was going through the dump with some coworkers and the CTO we estimated 8000 accounts were active in Calgary 1200 of which were female. So I doubt their 12000 number.

[blueski]

Originally Posted by cdutka

At least 1/2 the accounts in the dump are duplicates, AM seems to have a massive data integrity issue in there db.

Was going through the dump with some coworkers and the CTO we estimated 8000 accounts were active in Calgary 1200 of which were female. So I doubt their 12000 number.

I thought their analysis was pretty good. How did you determine 'active'. Their method of using the 'ever checked their inbox' and 'ever chatted' flags seemed pretty legit. Of those there was only a few thousand women of the 37 million users who actually were checking for males messaging them!

So practically speaking, no one ever cheated using Ashley Madison!

[Dion]

Originally Posted by jayswin

Wow, 37 million users, and looking like about 12000 were actual human female members.

So it was 37 million guys fighting for basically.......no one.

Doesn't paint a good picture in regards to the male gender

[Itse]

Originally Posted by blueski

I thought their analysis was pretty good. How did you determine 'active'. Their method of using the 'ever checked their inbox' and 'ever chatted' flags seemed pretty legit. Of those there was only a few thousand women of the 37 million users who actually were checking for males messaging them!

So practically speaking, no one ever cheated using Ashley Madison!

A quote from the gizmodo article:

Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.

The men’s accounts tell a story of lively engagement with the site, with over 20 million men hopefully looking at their inboxes, and over 10 million of them initiating chats. The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.

So yeah. Not a lot of hooking up going on.

Especially when you consider that female accounts were free, so all the (smart) journalists and just randomly curious people, regardless of gender, probably have registered as females and show some activity.

[Calgary14]

The fembots of Ashley Madison: http://gizmodo.com/the-fembots-of-as...son-1726670394

[troutman]

Gizmodo:

What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.

You have to wonder what % of female profiles across other dating platforms are fake?

[FlameOn]

Originally Posted by photon

Evidence that the number of real women on the site was vanishingly small?

http://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-th...ase-1725558944

I'm sure this is how the few real women on AM felt like.

NSFW!

[flylock shox]

Originally Posted by sureLoss

McAfee claims that the evidence points to the hacker being a female employee of Ashley Madison

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/john-mcafee...-media-1516833

Reading stuff like that makes me feel frightened of how much tech knowledge some people have (and my own complete ignorance of all things techie). It makes a great case for the old adage "knowledge is power."

[Krovikan]

Originally Posted by blueski

I thought their analysis was pretty good. How did you determine 'active'. Their method of using the 'ever checked their inbox' and 'ever chatted' flags seemed pretty legit. Of those there was only a few thousand women of the 37 million users who actually were checking for males messaging them!

So practically speaking, no one ever cheated using Ashley Madison!

Looking at the accounts we noticed that all email address had 2 accounts, so 50% of accounts are dups, looking at Calgary data my CTO found that 90% estimated were bots I believe correlating login geo location data and credit card activity, I was able to confirm this data as I found a pattern im the data while testing my gpu with the data, so we were down to 3-4m real accounts. At this point a script could count Calgary based male and femal accounts, I dont know how he jumped to active accounts, and cant ask since he is on vacation; however he came up with the accounts active and we just applied the percentage of female from total Calgary real accounts to the active accounts for rough female Calgary real and active accounts.

Problem with mail flag is we could not trust it was reliably set by AM code and seeing that they claim 300m users, 37m leaked, 18.5m dups and only 3-4m real users not trusting AM was a key factor in the analysis

[pylon]

To me, the mist egregious thing, is not the cheating aspect, it is the fact that this thing was a massive scam. Many of these people (mainly men it seems) would have never compromised themselves in the first place, or been lured by the temptation had they known that virtually no women used the site.

In a way, it was almost a form of entrapment. I can vaguely see this from the perspective of a married person that has been locked out by their partner for years, or been given nothing but emotionless, nail painting sex or soulless, 'because it's your birthday' hand jobs. In fact I have a couple friends trapped in marriages like this, one.... it's been 2.5 years for him. The lure of getting some sort of fulfillment is there, and worth the risk to that individual. But the risk would have never been taken had they known that they were reaching out to a server, in some dingy closet somewhere. It makes it even more pathetic.

What these men and almost no women did was wrong, the fraudulent user base created by this company, is far worse. I hope the owner of this company is charged, and does a nice, healthy, little prison sentence.

[Hugh Jahrmes]

Pylon, your post reminds me of a comment a female coworker made - maybe this was the endgame after all, with whoever did this behind the scenes being more involved in the creation of the site than well ever know. Crazy conspiracy theory, but would be pretty messed up - and we livein a messed up world.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by pylon

To me, the mist egregious thing, is not the cheating aspect, it is the fact that this thing was a massive scam. Many of these people (mainly men it seems) would have never compromised themselves in the first place, or been lured by the temptation had they known that virtually no women used the site.

In a way, it was almost a form of entrapment. I can vaguely see this from the perspective of a married person that has been locked out by their partner for years, or been given nothing but emotionless, nail painting sex or soulless, 'because it's your birthday' hand jobs. In fact I have a couple friends trapped in marriages like this, one.... it's been 2.5 years for him. The lure of getting some sort of fulfillment is there, and worth the risk to that individual. But the risk would have never been taken had they known that they were reaching out to a server, in some dingy closet somewhere. It makes it even more pathetic.

What these men and almost no women did was wrong, the fraudulent user base created by this company, is far worse. I hope the owner of this company is charged, and does a nice, healthy, little prison sentence.

It's not just Ashley Madison btw. I know a guy who used to work for a chat site where he spent his days pretending to be women of various ages.

So you know. That's a thing.

[Erick Estrada]

So essentially this whole thing has turned out to be not that big of a deal? Ashley Madison has been proven to be a fraud but it's very evident that very few men with memberships at the site ever had affairs born from this website. Don't get me wrong as they still have explaining to do to their spouse to why they signed up and what other sites they may be involved in, etc but the fact is that membership to this site is not evidence of anyone having an affair because there are virtually no real women on the site.

You have to give Noel Biderman some credit for masterminding this scam and making himself rich as had this not been uncovered he would have continued to rake in millions of dollars from men across the world for providing them a fantasy service in lieu of the real thing they think they were signing on for. The real genius is that unlike other fraudulent businesses even after it's been uncovered as a fraud he's still not going to see any jail time. I think this has still been a very good lesson as it has uncovered the shadiness of internet dating sites as it seems that a lot of these sites are using bots to entice males.

On a personal note this has been very interesting for me. Being an older guy that has been married for a long time I had become a little envious of how younger people had it easy today with Tinder and all these internet hook up sites as prior to my finding my wife I had to meet women the old fashioned way such as through friends, bars/parties, work, etc where your only form of contact was face to face or dial up telephone conversation but they all took a fair amount of work and commitment for relationships/hook ups that would go nowhere. I still think that some of the better sites can be good aids for finding someone or random hook ups but it appears with the good comes the bad and that's those who see the $$$ potential capitalizing on this.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

^Not that big of a deal? It's a bigger deal in light of that... as has been noted many times, cheating on your spouse is not illegal. Fraud is a criminal offense. Not sure why you think it's a foregone conclusion that there would be no charges. Maybe there won't, but I don't know that.

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

^Not that big of a deal? It's a bigger deal in light of that... as has been noted many times, cheating on your spouse is not illegal. Fraud is a criminal offense. Not sure why you think it's a foregone conclusion that there would be no charges. Maybe there won't, but I don't know that.

I'm assuming the clause taken out of that link from Pylon is how they can skirt around the fake profiles;

Still, there is a clause in the Ashley Madison terms of service that notes that “some” people are using the site purely “for entertainment” and that they are “not seeking in person meetings with anyone they meet on the Service, but consider their communications with users and Members to be for their amusement.” The site stops short of saying these are fake people, but does admit that many profiles are for “amusement only.”

Now I'm not a lawyer so it's possible that may not be iron clad but it appears the area where they are open to fraud is where they charged members to close their accounts and erase their activity when they were not erasing anything. I'm pretty sure there will be some charges but it's hard to say if Biderman would do any time.