Ashley Madison
Ashley Madison is a Canadian online hookup portal that opened in 2001. Its main feature was the focus on finding sex on the side: the creators argued that this is the ideal site for easy hooking up if you are married or in a long relationship. The official slogan of the site, "Life is short. Have an affair," and billboards in U.S. cities. The site quickly gained popularity and hit a ceiling of 120 million visits per month in 2015.
Ashley Madison's scandalous politics drew public attention: many accused the creators of building their business on parasitizing broken couples and broken marriages. In 2009 they wanted to run their own ads during the broadcasting of the "Superbowl" and in the following year they tried to agree on the renaming of two architectural objects. First they wanted to call Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport Madison Airport, and then they tried to negotiate with the owners of MetLife Stadium to do the same. In both cases, the proponents were turned down.
What happened?
Popularity found Ashley Madison itself: On July 20, a group of hackers from The Impact Team stole the accounts of 37 million users. After a while they made demands: to shut down the Canadian dating site completely as well as a similar resource from the same company - Established Men. As a preventive measure, the intruders published data from 5 million accounts, including private correspondence, candid photos, sexual stories, real names, and payment information. Later, there were even special sites offering to check the fidelity of your significant other.
The Ashley Madison development team apologized to customers, but did not close the portal, as it would have resulted in multimillion losses. Shortly before the incident, they had intended to list the company on the London stock exchanges, which would have attracted about $200 million in investment.
"The perpetrator or perpetrators of this have appointed themselves moral judges, juries and executioners, determined to impose their own principles of morality on society. We will not sit quietly by and let these thieves dictate their ideology to people around the world," said then Ashley Madison creator and Avid Life Media holding company owner Noel Biederman.
A month later, The Impact Team made good on their promise and published the remaining 32 million accounts with the same information: passwords, logins, confidential data, and a final appeal to users. In it, they said there were a lot of fake female accounts on the site, whose owners tricked men for money and sent them fake photos. At the end, the hackers added that customers should sue the developers of Ashley Madison for failing to protect private information.