After hackers revealed 32 million of the names and passwords from cheating site Ashley Madison, pushing out CEO Noel Biderman and beginning an army of lawsuits, the site is still online. Owners, or management, must believe the business can still make money, or that killing the site would add to the legal cases against it.
Several things about how Ashley Madison does business were part of a number of analyses of the site’s business and the information that hackers gave out. It has very few female members, and probably many fewer who want to have affairs. Women were not actually communicating with men, for the most part. It appears that false communications were established by “bots,” which tricked men into believing they were talking to another human.
The Ashley Madison site continues to promote itself as winner of the “Trusted Security Award,” with 100% Discrete Service and as SSL Security Site. The most preposterous claim on the Ashley Madison homepage is that it has 41,035,000 anonymous members. It is, as a matter of fact, according to the site, the best place in the world for people who are married to meet other people who are married to have affairs.
What happened? Why is the site still online? It is unlikely that the Ashley Madison owners believe they will still add members. The presence of the site only adds to the embarrassment or even catastrophic results members have experienced since the hack.
The least likely explanation is that management of the business has been too busy to take it down. Another explanation is that killing the site would be a complete admission of the failure to protect data and to fulfill its core mission of allowing people to cheat without consequence. Or, it may be that the end of the site would give the 10 million or so people whose names and passwords were not hacked an excuse to mount legal challenges of their own for losing a service that they paid for. Only Ashley Madison management and their attorneys know the full truth.
The fact that the Ashley Madison site is still online is nearly as extraordinary as the hack that brought the business down.
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