Long before I launched Ashley Madison there were affairs,
and long after I'm gone there'll be affairs
and so what I'm just trying to do is help people
have the most perfect affair.
Biderman says he built a billion-dollar business
betting on infidelity.
25 million members in 37 countries.
My phone was dancing across the table. It was crazy.
They made it sound like it was this play land of people hooking up...
...it had glamour, sex and crime,
hacking and danger. It had everything.
Kind of a quick hookup kind of site...
This is the story of a website,
and the rise and fall of its ambitious founder Noel Biderman.
The audacious Ashley Madison dot com was set up in 2011
as a safe place to arrange illicit affairs.
By 2006 the site had 1.1million users in North America
and had launched in Europe.
Its growth after that was extraordinary.
-26 million people, that's growth! -It's good business.
What is your goal? Just keep goin'?
World domination, keep going to the moon.
In 2007 Biderman became CEO
and found himself in the middle of a media storm.
I'm not necessarily encouraging infidelity
I don't think it needs that much encouragement.
How are you not encouraging infidelity?
Noel Biderman appeared continuously on TV chat shows
defending and promoting the site.
He called himself the king of infidelity.
His wife, Amanda, also took part in the promotions.
I see it as a platform that helps people stay married,
they help millions of people find contentment,
passion and happiness.
Noel said that society was changing,
the model of relationships that we have from the past
and at the moment isn't working.
A lot of people are having affairs and
it's all done behind people's backs.
It's destructive for families.
And they said that they were leading the way in helping with this.
I was separated from my wife,
I was working a lot. It's hard to meet people.
Christopher was looking for a like-minded woman
to have an affair with.
The big attraction to it was that it's a hookup,
it's not a date. There isn't any of the risk,
you know, everybody knows where they stand.
It was definitely more geared towards sort of the,
as I like to say, the afternoon delight, kind of situation.
Kind of a quick hook up kind of site.
Like any dating site, users had to choose profile names
and fill in their preferences.
Experimenting with tantric sex. One-night stand...
Although these choices were a little more direct than usual.
...likes to be watched, cuddling and hugging, and erotic movies.
Sounds like an interesting weekend.
Tamsin is a marketing consultant and a serial mistress.
She has chosen affairs to committed relationships most of her life.
Initially, you know, men are very hesitant to make the first move.
When we start talking that's the first thing.
They want to find out, are you real?
Do you really live in the United States?
And that's when I would start getting emails saying
that this woman checked out your profile,
she wants to talk to you, this person's interested in you.
And because if you didn't have a paid account,
you hadn't bought the credits,
you couldn't see the actual pictures of the profiles
they were all blurred.
Men had to buy credits
in order to reply to messages sent to them.
And then once you start talking, inevitably for some strange reason,
men have this insatiable desire to send you dick pictures.
Pictures of their penises. Sometimes it's even the first picture.
I don't even know what their face looks like.
Okay.
People have affairs and cheat for a lot of different reasons,
it's not always just physical.
We all like to think it's that but in reality even men
the vast majority are seeking out an affair for emotional reasons as well.
I did meet and talk to quite a few men,
a lot of politicians...
A lot of corporate CEOs, a lot of guys
who are just in middle management, just not happy.
I mean that was one thing about Ashley Madison,
you got everything from construction workers and students
so it was pretty interesting.
People want more from their relationships,
more from their lives and
not feeling so ashamed to be honest about
what they really want.
People are gonna have affairs anyway.
It's always happened, it's on an increase.
It wasn't in the workplace.
It wasn't with close friends of the family.
I got that concept.
It's less damaging, people's needs get met.
Ashley Madison.com was bought
by another of Noel's companies, Avid Life Media in 2007.
Their promotional videos gave a veneer of corporate acceptability
to otherwise niche products.
Two years later they created EstablishedMen.com and
CougarLife.com calling them innovative dating services.
But the main money maker was always Ashley Madison.
# Looking for someone other than my wife #
# Other than my wife Ashley Madison's right #
Ashley Madison became known for their cheeky,
often outrageous press campaigns.
# other than my wife #
This cheesy advert was banned by Australian regulators.
# Looking for someone other than my wife #
# Other than my wife Ashley Madison's right #
They courted controversy around the world,
translating their glossy ads everywhere they went.
In 2009 Tiger Woods was caught cheating on his wife.
Within a week Ashley Madison had offered to pay him
5 million dollars to be the face of the brand.
He didn't take the money, but 4 months later
they had sponsored the Tiger Woods Mistress Pageant
on The Howard Stern Show.
Here's our guest judge Noel Biderman.
Dude put up a hundred grand.
It seemed that no gimmick was too tabloid.
...she's mistress number four.
The peculiar genius not just of their marketing efforts
but I think of their leadership seems to be to be able to take anything,
even negative news and turn it into a promotional opportunity.
You are Tiger Woods Mistress,
here comes Noel Biderman with a check for 75,000 dollars.
Despite the 2008 economic downturn, Ashley Madison appeared to be recession-proof.
By 2015 Avid Life Media announced
that they had grossed 115 million dollars in the previous year,
up 45 per cent.
Pre-tax profits came in at 55 million dollars.
But then, on 19th July last year, everything changed.
Brian Krebbs, a tech journalist,
revealed that Ashley Madison had been hacked.
Employees had opened their computers
to find an illustrated message on their screens.
The Impact Team hackers threatened to publish
stolen data unless Ashley Madison and Established Men
shut down their controversial websites.
The consequences for not complying as noted
in this threat would be the release of Ashley Madison
and Established Men client list,
including their names, client profiles and credit card data.
By the time I've read the story it hit them,
it was all over the world.
I think every major news agency had already covered it within 6 to 12 hours.
Avid Life Media
has been fully cooperating with the police investigation.
This hack is one of the largest data breaches in the world.
I was in a meeting and all of a sudden
my phone started dancing across the table,
and I'm trying to concentrate,
and I'm looking over
and I'm seeing the names of business associates,
my business clients, friends of mine,
people I had met on Ashley Madison contacting me.
And my heart sank.
The hack appeared very strange because
it was so hollywoodesque as if it had been scripted.
Crazily so, I mean when you cover hacks all the time,
it's always very dry.
Nobody's very interested in the details of how they actually got the data
and spread it. But this was different.
The impact team gave Avid Life 30 days
to shut down their sites
enough time for the media to get into frenzy.
The hackers were blackmailing with the threat of more data to come.
Everyone was desperate to know who was using
the world's number one website for adultery?
When the company didn't comply,
over 30 million user details were released
Across the world suspicious partners frantically tried to find out
if their partner was among them.
One Australian radio show went a step further:
They were happy to help trawl through the data dump. Live on air.
When it came on the news about the Ashley Madison hack
he sort of went a bit funny and you've got his details
We've got his details here. And his details have revealed
that he's actually on the website, Joe.
-Yeah, I'm sorry
Are you freaking kidding me?
The ripple effect of the impact team's actions
has and will continue to have a long term social
and economic impact, and they have already sparked
spinoffs of crimes and further victimization.
I had quite a few of the gentlemen that I had met and talked to
their wives were decimated and hurt
and they wanted to talk.
As of this morning we have two unconfirmed reports
of suicides associated because of the leak
of Ashley Madison's customers profiles.
This being covered as if the CIA had been hacked.
What is so interesting here is that somebody would want to do this.
...there's lipstick. Who is she?
Many celebrities, politicians, religious leaders
and military personnel were reported to be members.
Just tell me her name, you might as well tell me.
This was brought to wife's attention.
She has forgiven me for this mistake that I've made.
I've sought forgiveness to God and he's forgiven me
so I've been completely cleansed of this sin.
After the frenzy around user identities had died down,
the media turned its attention to the business itself.
It became obvious that Avid Life Media profited from a wide range of websites.
And not all of them were dating services.
Ashley Madison's meteoric rise continued unabated
and by 2015 they claimed to have over 30 million users.
-Alex.
They even launched their very own Affair Anywhere mobile app
and brazenly spread the word around the globe.
But on the 19th July the site was hacked with catastrophic effects.
It would become one of the largest cyber breaches of all time.
Multiple sites are now being downloaded
nobody is going to be able to erase that information.
But despite the sensitivity of the website,
we now know that
Ashley Madison was warned of security vulnerabilities
a number of times before the 2015 scandal.
The Philippines has become an unlikely global cyber hotspot.
Jayson Zabate is a Filipino hacker.
He managed to infiltrate the website in the months
before the disastrous hack of July 2015.
Just checking Ashley Madison website.
I try to hack it.
I check the code and find what is the flaw or the weaknesses.
Jayson is part of an international community of cyber bounty hunters
known as white hat hackers.
My job is to help keep companies secure. I don't want to be a black hat.
I am not a bad guy.
These hackers can make a lot of money by showing
large companies where their vulnerabilities lie.
Jayson pays his university fees this way.
He found a way into Ashley Madison relatively quickly.
I have found cross-site scripting and bypassing cross-site request forgery.
That will allow an attacker to change profile details.
Jayson told Avid Life Media
he had managed to find a flaw in their security
and they paid him a small fee in return for information.
But it was too late.
The Impact Team of hackers had apparently been accessing
the site for a long time before Jayson got there.
Impact Team claims they had been watching the site grow
for some time to the tens of millions of users.
And they said they wanted to stop the next 60 million customers.
They likened Avid Life Media to a drug dealer abusing addicts.
Joseph Cox believes he is the only journalist
to have had contact with the Impact hackers themselves.
Impact Team said when they hacked Ashley Madison no one was watching.
As in there were very few security barriers
to getting into the network and they also said
it was possible to hop from different parts of the network
with a very simple password.
And this had been in the work for some time.
They said that they had been exfiltrating the data
over a number of years.
Ashley Madison talked a good game about their security
but as we've seen security was not at the top of their agenda,
what was at the top of their agenda was making money.
Jeremy Bullock is a data analyst
who used the information released in the hack to analyze
Ashley Madison's business practices.
He was one of the first to identify the company's use of fembots.
When he looked at the email addresses of users,
he discovered 837 individual members
that all shared the same email address.
These seemed to be fake profiles
who were programmed to contact real users.
They have also been called engagers or iconians.
These were algorithms that enabled
Ashley Madison to contact gullible men
and pretend to be available women
and made them part with money.
Iconians would send messages to users of the site.
In order for men to chat back they would have to pay.
Why 837 rather than 80,000? Because they didn't need 80,000.
You could move these 837 around, you could make them different.
They were programs now,
they didn't have to be manually manipulated.
Very very clever.
They made it sound like it was this play land of people hooking up
and there's millions of women here
and they're all interested in you.
I had contact with probably around 200 profiles
and out of that I believe I spoke with one actual person.
But the idea that bots
and fake profiles were on the pages of Ashley Madison was not new. As early as 2008 consumer attorney Fillippo Marchino
was preparing a case against Avid Life Media
on behalf of disgruntled users.
One of the first things we did is we pulled the terms
and conditions off of the website of Ashley Madison
and buried in the middle was a couple of sentences
that read something to the extent of
"this is only an entertainment website,
you may be responding or contacted by robots"
and that just did not sound right
because people were not engaging AshleyMadison.com
to talk to robots.
That was not the crux of the idea.
Fillippo then came across AshleyMadisonSucks.com,
a sounding board for unhappy customers.
He discovered that Biderman's company,
Avid Life Media was taking legal action against the site.
We felt that AshleyMadisonSucks.com was a rightful forum
for people to voice their opinions
and was in no way violative of the trademark AshleyMadison.com.
Fillippo agreed to represent the owner
of AshleyMadisonSucks.com.
What happened then is that things got strange.
The proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan if you will.
We became the target of online activities that
couldn't really be traced back to anybody.
But that were borderline bullying,
if you will.
Suddenly web pages were created blackmailing
Fillippo's client and threatening him if he didn't take down
AshleyMadisonSucks.com.
False Things were written about Fillippo,
his client, family members and even his employees.
Anonymous emails were sent with further threats
and untrue allegations:
one suggested that Fillippo's client had HIV.
We were never actually able to trace back
who these emails were coming from
but it all started occurring right at the same time.
It seemed to be a coordinated attack
to dissuade my client from proceeding with what he was doing.
In a separate effort to get the site shut down,
Noel Biderman offered the owner of AshleyMadisonSucks.com
money for the IP address.
He repeated his demands in a phone call recorded by the owner
and in the presence of two witnesses.
Give me the URL back
I offered you ten grand, you're being an ass.
I'm being a schmuck. You sent an email to my girlfriend.
You have no idea. Yeah just wait for the world
of hurt I will bring on you. Just wait.
I found out on the news that they'd been hacked
and all their information had been dumped.
I was very surprised to find out that some documents
which had been exchanged between us and them
which otherwise should have been confidential,
were now public domain.
You email my girlfriend and tell her
that you're putting up a site about her and she may have HIV.
I'm going to do so much worse to you.
You're messing with my livelihood.
You choose to be an ass. I'm being one back
but I can be ten times worse. I have way more resources than you.
You have 24 hours my friend. I'm going to drag you through the mud.
The first dump of information
by The Impact Team of hackers revealed
information about many users of the site
but the hack didn't end there.
It seemed on the surface to be cut and dry,
here is a company, it's been hacked.
Here are all the victims. There's the story the end.
It should have blown over, but it didn't.
What came then took the hack to the next level.
Plenty of data breeches take customer data,
emails addresses, passwords maybe some other customer information
and depending on the website that can be relatively easy.
But to get emails, product source-code,
internal documents, the hacker really has to take several more steps
and really penetrate a company's network.
The second dump of information related to the company
and the CEO himself.
There was so much email.
I mean it was every email from 2011,
2012 all the way till June 2015.
A lot of email.
I'm totally guessing here but what
it looked like somebody had thrown
a USB stick in someone's computers
and just dragged over email files.
I looked less like a hack than a copy.
Not all data breaches become public, I mean
probably most of them don't become public.
But the fact that anybody can log on
to a website on the so called dark web,
download this data and see it for themselves...
I mean that's appealing.
I start looking through the emails because...
I was interested in seeing if
I could figure out who would do it.
I wanted to figure out who did it.
Well, then I became an addict.
But as Gina, the editor of ANewDomain.com,
looked through the emails
more questions came up.
Soon I was just looking in the email trying to figure out,
what was Ashley Madison?
Was it really a dating site? It didn't appear so.
Avid Life Media
the parent company of Ashley Madison,
and headed by Noel Biderman owned a lot of different websites
through many different shell companies.
Some of these like Established Men and Cougar Life
were publicly part of the portfolio,
and some of them weren't so obviously linked to Avid Life Media.
It isn't one dating site, it's many sites in every major market in the world.
It's really a sprawling business and a sprawling collection of websites
that appear to be designed to get people to come in
to do other stuff.
And that stuff doesn't seem to have a lot to do with dating.
The company owned websites
that seemed to cater for every conceivable male fantasy.
Each one was slick and targeted at a specific market.
So yes there's married women that will have an affair with you,
that's Ashley Madison.
There's older women who will have an affair with younger guys
that's Cougar Life.
Broke College Girls, find a broke college girl
and maybe you could be her sugar daddy.
There's that site. There's bondage sites, there's gay sites,
if you can find a male fantasy, there's a site for it.
All the websites had one aim: to draw in male customers.
Ashley Madison user Tamsin could see how
people got drawn onto other websites.
I think it's become a sort of a gateway drug,
if you will, for relationships and websites,
and Internet dating of this sort, that it's a good area
and a good site for people to get their feet wet,
and then once they're there, then the banners
for the more sort of directed websites pop up.
One of Avid Life's most popular websites
was Established Men.
It claims to be the premier online dating service that
connects young, beautiful women with rich, successful men!
The website makes it clear women cannot advertise
their services as an escort
however many female users are looking for
''a mutually beneficial arrangement'', an MBA
a common online term for a relationship often involving money.
A lot of times women are looking for arrangements
because they're having difficulty making ends meet.
And a lot of times men are not in a position
to have a formal relationship with all the bells and whistles
and responsibilities that go along with it.
Marketing Consultant Tamsin has lived
an arrangement lifestyle on and off since she was 19.
This is more of a situation where the man provides the woman
with an allowance, spoiling, takes care of her travel expenses.
Enables her basically to be able to be on his schedule on an as needed basis.
Like the term sugar-daddy,
a mutually beneficial arrangement, is a relationship
where men and women negotiate the terms.
A lot of those are escorts. Some of them just boldly say "escorts".
But...
Escort services are illegal in the US outside of a couple of areas
so you can't really come out and say:
"Hey, I'm a hooker!" You know, it's illegal.
Avid Life Media also owns ArrangementFinders.com,
a more blatantly erotic website.
Even though the website states
that it doesn't allow escorts to use their service,
they actively encouraged girls
who would like some extra income through dating to join.
Start dating the way evolution programmed you to
and we can ship bubbles right to you.
They created another tongue-in-cheek marketing campaign,
this time with the porn star Kayden Kross as the face of the brand.
We're not just creating arrangements,
we are also creating new jobs.
-No jobs.
-Blow jobs.
When they deliberately advertised outside a university
they made the news again. People were stunned.
I'm here along Santa Monica Boulevard near Overland Avenue.
A spokesperson for Avid Life Media said the placement
and timing of the ad is part of the company's strategy.
With graduation right around the corner
and students looking for jobs and money.
When we asked if this was prostitution
the spokesperson said, "No, it's intimacy with a twist."
But emails in the dump
purporting to be from Noel Biderman's inbox
reveal that the company not only knew they hosted escorts,
they actively sought them.
In one case it appeared that 2,500 escorts were emailed enticing them
to join Arrangement Finders.
When it worked they planned to contact 45,000 more.
Some emails discussed the possibility of bringing foreign women to the US
to work as sugar babies.
And how the company would market them.
They also investigated how the women could come to the US
by lying to the authorities.
ArrangementFinders.com
is one of Avid Life's most successful sites.
And it was to take Noel Biderman
and Avid Life Media in a new direction: movies.
He experimented with product placement
and an unknown starlet.
It just happened to be in hardcore porn.
The site is also known for its shocking,
deliberately provocative marketing stunts.
This ad from 2013 featuring zombie husbands and wives was banned
buying the company even more free publicity.
But the owners of Ashley Madison, Avid Life Media,
have a loose definition of dating.
It's so simple a caveman could use it.
In their deliberately lo-fi styled advert
for ArrangementFinders.com
Kayden Kross, the face of the brand, explains what they do.
It's a dating site for all you sexy silver backs out there
who think it's time for a little arm candy.
And for all you arm candy to get a bit of purse candy.
Are these dating options any good you ask?
No. But blowjobs are f**king great.
The company has denied this is prostitution,
but rather intimacy with a twist.
ArrangementFinders.com is interesting for an additional reason:
this is the website that took the CEO Noel Biderman
and his team into the world of pornography.
I took some photos of myself in a state of undress in a bank on Wall Street.
And then the photos went viral.
The bathroom was not a public it was a private bathroom
and I used to take pictures in there when I was bored anyway
just cause I'm a millennial and we do things like that.
And within days, literally days, they went completely viral over the Internet.
And I was dubbed "The Wall Street porn star"
before I even decided if I wanted to do porn or not.
But at that point I was committed right?
You've got that Ashley Madison investment right?
Yeah, and we're working on some other interesting stuff.
Veronica Vain would become Noel Biderman's leading lady.
Screwing Wall Street,
the Arrangement Finders IPO was the first fully-branded porn film,
full of not-so-subtle product placement.
Veronica was offered the lead part as her porn debut.
The story was a spoof of the original Hollywood film Wall Street.
You wanna work with me?
The reason I was really interested in this deal
I knew that it was pretty groundbreaking
what they were doing.
Even if it wasn't necessarily the best way to go about it at the time,
the fact that they were doing it
and that they were a mainstream brand.
You were good enough to get in my office.
Let's see it you're good enough to stay.
That movie wasn't really the gold mine for him,
he wasn't just looking for his brand to be in porn.
Just the fact that it was my name
and I was this girl who was being portrayed as being young and cute
and having a good head on her shoulders.
I was the girl he wanted to sell to all these guys.
The plan worked very well.
The clips that were released for free have had over three million views
but it was Veronica's association with the brand
and appearances on legitimate news channels
that really had an effect.
I always wanted to do something
more entrepreneurial with my career
I knew I wasn't fit for a more conservative environment
and I saw an industry that's undergoing a new wave of innovation
and I really wanted to be a part of it.
The site had 200 per cent increase in overall web traffic
but more impressively a 400 per cent increase in signups.
Which I think it's basically saying that if you were going to Arrangement Finders
as a result of seeing me in this clip or in the media or something
you're almost immediately converting into a member.
It was another major marketing success for Noel Biderman.
Why do you think Noel was so clever at this?
Speaking as an entrepreneur myself most entrepreneurs
when they come up with an idea
it's because they saw a market need for something that they needed.
Most entrepreneurs won't just like:
"Oh, people need this but I don't really want it."
Most entrepreneurs when they start something
they want the product that's why they are making it.
So I can only imagine that he might have wanted to have some sort of affair,
or make it easier to have affairs.
And that's quite brilliant that he went to the market
being like ''I don't have affair,
I'm happily married blah blah, I just like start this for other guys.''
If your husband was cheating on you,
would you be OK with him going to a site such as yours?
Absolutely not, that's not what I signed up for.
Noel was the master of press interviews.
He often included his wife in the discussion.
And I live in a traditional situation with Noel and...
And he was always clear: he had never had an extra-marital affair.
And I would be devastated if he did this to me.
But information released in the Ashley Madison hack
revealed that Noel did have affairs,
in fact, it appeared that over three years
he had had relationships with a number of women,
many of whom he had met through his own site, Established Men.
Noel frequently discussed money with these women
and even offered one work at Avid Life.
He appears to have been a serial sugar daddy himself.
It seems that very little of the Ashley Madison story was as it appeared.
It's hard to know if the mainstream media would have given Noel
and his company quite so much airtime
if they'd known all that was happening behind the scenes.
I don't think Ashley Madison is inventing prostitution.
I think what the emails suggest they're doing is helping to automate it.
And making it very easy.
Just like Google didn't invent looking stuff up.
To my knowledge, Ashley Madison, they're not running a prostitution ring
or their own escort service that's against the law or anything like that.
What I find more immoral is about the way
they deal with reporters and journalists,
misleading them into thinking that the company is something that it isn't.
But that's not illegal either.
Because they're a private company
and they can tell people anything they want to about their business.
I think Ashley Madison were brilliant at marketing
they seemed to know what the papers wanted.
And they would take this little seed of truth,
blow it up and that was probably what made them so successful in the media.
You need to get a little bit more with times, and to be honest...
Louise Van der Veld
is a professional sex and relationship counselor.
She was employed by Ashley Madison
as a media spokesperson in 2013,
although she soon fell out with the company over money.
She did get an insight into how the company worked.
...because the relationship model is fundamentally flawed from the off.
When I first agreed to be their spokesperson,
it was very much me coming from an authentic point of view,
about my beliefs about my experience of working with couples who had affairs.
A lot of that kind of got ditched
and they totally glamorized it with a shocking headline approach.
And the hacked emails revealed not just exaggeration,
but deliberate deception of the media.
Even blue chip publications fell for their stories.
Forbes is one of the world's largest financial publications,
it's one of the most respected financial publications in the world.
Noel and Avid Life Media
were cultivating a relationship with a journalist
who was trying to get a piece commissioned by the magazine.
Forbes editors had agreed to do an article about them
and their fantastic growth but they wanted to see some numbers.
And from the trail of emails you see employees saying,
woah I can do up this chart and I can make up this set of data points
a lot of it seems to be largely invented.
The company appears to have dramatically exaggerated
the financial figures for the Ashley Madison website.
All those websites, all those affiliate marketing deals.
All the many different little revenue streams
that Ashley Madison and Avid
and its related companies have all over the world.
But how could Forbes have known about all of that? And back then nobody did.
Noel's dream was for Ashely Madison
to be listed on the stock market
and sell its shares to the public through what's called an IPO.
We're a huge company. Maybe you can help us with the IPO,
I think it's about time we go and raise a billion bucks and show the world.
That's interesting!
It could happen. If you looked at our business with a blind on it right?
You just looked at the numbers and
the growth and the membership and you go oh my God
this thing is worth billions...
Noel wanted everyone to look at the business
through a filter. To cover the entire empire of sex sites, porn affiliates
and escort listings with the blanket of Ashley Madison.
Because Noel was so good at making it look mainstream and OK,
and commonplace and OK to talk about,
I think people were more likely to be able to talk openly
about AshleyMadison.com than they are about PornHub.com.
So if Forbes comes out and says: ''Wow! Ashley Madison is one of the largest,
most successful dating sites in history,
it's nearly a billion-dollar company then 8 other major publications
the world over will say ''Wow! Forbes, Bloomberg, it must be true.''
I mean with nobody really questioning,
could this really be a billion-dollar company
45 per cent growth in one year really?
You really can't blame Ashley Madison for taking advantage of a lazy press.
In September 2015, two months after the hack,
another Forbes article was written:
"We really don't know how big Ashley Madison was, although I'm pretty sure
that it was nowhere near as big as it seemed."
But while the hack appears to have revealed so much
about the users and owners of the website,
we know very little about the hackers themselves.
A year later no one has been arrested for the crime
and the case is still ongoing.
Avid Life Media is offering a 500,000 dollar reward
to anyone providing information that leads to the identification,
arrest and prosecution of the person or persons
responsible for the leak of the Ashley Madison database.
And no one has collected that half a million-dollar reward.
Standby.
Good looking, healthy,
certainly old enough to get married, what a lovely picture
this bride and groom make each is a dream in the others mind.
Many marriages were rocked
when the user details of AshleyMadison.com
were leaked last year. Divorce lawyers claimed
it was Christmas in September for the industry.
Why does it have to happen this way for them?
Whose fault was it?
The dating industry was also rocked.
Shortly after the hacked emails of Noel Biderman were published,
Avid Life Media announced that he had agreed to step down as CEO.
They said this was in the best interests of the company.
Team Impact, this is your wake up call.
Your actions are illegal and will not be tolerated.
But the police still have no idea who did it.
The hackers called themselves The Impact Team,
an anonymous-style group
who called the users of Ashley Madison cheating dirt bags
and accused Avid Life of profiting from the pain of others.
This kind of hack is known as hacktivism.
Hacker house near Manchester, is filled with people who know that world.
If you understand the rules of somebody else's system better than they do,
then you effectively get to rewrite the rules of the game.
Trying to take down a website that promotes unfaithfulness between couples.
It could be considered vigilantism.
Is it ok to cheat on your wife?
Because you can do it behind closed doors on this website,
and then what happens when that is exposed?
Are we all now supposed to feel sorry for you?
I personally would never do anything illegal,
but when the Ashley Madison thing happened it was like
yeah good on them!
A lot of big hacktivists, I mean this is what they go for,
they try to expose big corporate companies.
The means of going in and shutting down some other site,
it's still breaking the law.
It's getting serious, we're seeing more the effect it will have on
on people's lives.
Hacker House was set up to try
and bring hackers into the mainstream and not to break the law.
But The Impact Team's action was more than just illegal.
Whether they thought the reason behind it was purely moral,
only they can answer.
But it's not like this was a victimless crime at all,
I mean people killed themselves.
We still have no idea who hacked Avid Life Media,
and for what true motive.
They didn't appear to make money from the hack,
so there must have been a different reason.
Some people think it was a competitor
I'm of the belief that it was probably a competing website.
That may have masterminded or saw the opportunity.
May have planted an employee over a period of time.
Or they were the ones that handled the hack externally.
One theory was that it was an inside job.
There is chance that the Impact team was just an insider.
Judging by the quality and richness of the data.
Internal email, product source code,
they likely had to be on the company network itself
rather than just the website.
I believe that someone had a personal problem with the CEO
or the executives at the company
and felt cheated in some way
where they were getting revenge.
Judging by the way that I was treated by the company
and the way that they just seemed used to dealing with employees
that were not happy
I think it possibly was an inside job.
Lots of people could have had a motive
to either harm either Avid in general or Noel specifically.
People inside, people outside.
This was a company that sued a lot of people,
fired a lot of people.
Finding a person with a motive is too easy.
There's too many people with motives.
But whoever did it,
the real world impact of Ashley Madison continues.
Anybody who's been through what I've been through
through would love to see that site down.
Long before the hack,
Ashley Madison had been helping to destroy marriages.
Many of the real women on the site were from rural areas.
When the hack happened you can actually go and see per area,
Utah, Idaho... where they had some of the highest Ashley Madison accounts.
And these are conservative, rural areas.
It's something that actually is not very surprising to me.
In 2012, several years before the hack,
Jim received some messages on his phone.
By accident one of his wife's accounts was networked to his cell.
I started getting emails and text messages
between my wife and another guy telling him "I'm gonna start a fight with my husband
and figure out some way to go meet up with you."
I threw up. I actually threw up.
In the end, Jim was able
to recover many of the messages his wife had sent.
Stuff you can never un-know, you can never un-see
There was a video. Someone sent me a video, it was her having sex.
Jim discovered that his wife
had had affairs with six different men on the Ashley Madison website. It's like a drug, it's like you're addicted.
You want more, you want that adrenaline, you want that feeling.
That's the only way I can think of it.
I have these...
5 little kids.
I did not want them to be raised...
in a broken home.
I felt like it was my fault, I felt responsible.
I just tried talking to her and explaining, I love you,
we have 5 kids, let's not destroy this family.
But in the end it was impossible to reconcile:
the couple divorced.
It took a long time before I stopped getting nauseous,
like physically wanted to throw up any time I saw Ashley Madison.
Until the hack. That was a good day.
We don't know who did the hack, but we do know that
The Impact Team has threatened to do more attacks.
I asked the Impact team whether they were going to hit any other companies
and they said, essentially, sure.
Maybe even politicians.
All systems have weaknesses.
Even the biggest social networking sites.
There is no such thing as a secure system.
As more of our lives become intertwined with the digital world,
cars having connection to the internet for example,
hacking is only going to increase.
Is that scary?
Yeah!
Greeting citizens of the free world.