What was Ashley Madison’s data leak?
ON JULY 7, 2023, the documentary The Ashley Madison Affair, which chronicles the 2015 hacking of infamous dating website Ashley Madison, will begin streaming on Hulu.
Here’s what you need to know before you stream the three-part series.
2
What is Ashley Madison?
Ashley Madison describes herself as the “First Married”. dating Website.”
Launched in 2001, the Canadian online dating service caters to married people who want to engage in extramarital affairs.
The company slogan is: “Life is short. Having an affair.”
Like most online dating apps, Ashley Madison allows its users to create profiles and communicate with each other within the platform.
Darren J. Morgenstern, who founded the site, said. that Ashley Madison was realized to help people in relationships fill a void.
“People change, relationships change, circumstances change,” he said abc news. “There are no absolutes and you could get to a point in your relationship where staying monogamous is just monotonous.”
Ashley Madison currently has 60 million users.
What was Ashley Madison’s data leak?
In 2015, a hacking group called Impact Team infiltrated Ashley Madison’s database and collected 9.7 gigabytes worth of user information and payment details The New York Times.
At this point, the site had nearly 40 million users.
The hackers threatened to release their collected data and embarrass the site’s users unless Ashley Madison was permanently shut down.
When the site refused to comply with the request, the Impact team carried out its threat and made user information, including names, email addresses, and home addresses, publicly available.
“This event is not an act of hacktivism, but an act of crime,” the company said in a statement.
“This is an unlawful action against the individual members of AshleyMadison.com, as well as all freethinkers who choose to engage in entirely lawful online activities.
“The criminal or criminals involved in this act have appointed themselves moral judge, jury and executioner and see fit to impose a personal notion of virtue on society as a whole.”
Which celebrities were exposed by the data leak?
Thousands of Ashley Madison users were exposed during the leak, including celebrities and big names such as Counting On star Josh Duggar, President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and Christian YouTube celebrity Sam Rader, Florida Attorney Jeff Ashton, and Real Housewives star Josh Taekman.
2
Hunter denied ever having an Ashley Madison account, although it turned out his email address was part of the leak. “I am certain that the account in question does not belong to me,” he said in a statement. “This account was clearly set up by someone else without my knowledge.”
Meanwhile, it was discovered that Duggar has two accounts, both of which belong to a paid tier gazers.
“I was the greatest hypocrite of all time,” he declared in his own statement.
“While we stand up for the faith and Family Dears, I have been secretly looking at pornography on the internet for the last few years and it turned into a secret addiction and I was unfaithful to my wife.
“I caused grief and blame to my family, close friends and fans of our show with my actions, which I committed when I was 14-15 years old, and now I’ve broken their trust again.”