Infidelity site Ashley Madison hacked as attackers demand total shutdown
It "hack" been nearly a decade since hackers dumped huge amounts of personal data site Ashley Madison, the infamous dating site which, back incatered mostly to men who wanted to cheat on their wives. Now, that story is back in the media, partly because of a recent Netflix documentary about it.
You can see me in that series, a nerdy talking head in clips from various TV news shows frombecause I was one of the journalists breaking the story. But neither the Netflix series nor the handful of other documentaries still in the works get at what was truly revolutionary — and chilling — about the Ashley Madison affair.
People have been trying to have affairs with strangers for thousands of years. Ashley Madison was never really about that. Its site became a prototype for what social media platforms such as Facebook are becoming: places so packed with AI-generated nonsense that they feel like spam cages, or information prisons where the only messages that get through are auto-generated ads.
After a rebrand, Ashley Madison is now owned by Ruby Life and bills itself as a spicy dating site for married people. But back then, it marketed itself as a social networking site for men seeking affairs with women. In latea group calling itself Impact Team got site at the site and hacked into its servers. The group grabbed a bunch dating user data and code, then posted it on Reddit with the claim that 95 per cent of the people on the site were men. I was intrigued. How could all those men be having affairs, if there were virtually continue reading women on the site?
With the help of two hackers and a database expert, I decided to find out. What I discovered was a bizarre scam — though it was far more like Westworld than US reality show Cheaters. The company had systematically created an army of fake women, mostly very simple chatbots called engagers, who would flirt https://telegram-web.online/catgirl-onlyfans.php men to lure them into paying for a subscription to the site.
As we hack over the code, we found that, although there were a few human women on the site, more than 11 million interactions logged in the database were between human men and female bots. And the men had to pay for every single message they sent. There were real women behind the curtain, though. We found company emails in the data dump and discovered that Avid Life Media was also paying a small number of workers to generate fake profiles for more than 70, engager bots. One of these workers sued the company inarguing that she had dating required to type up so many fake profiles that she permanently injured her wrists the lawsuit was dating in It gets weirder: we found an site email where employees discussed a tool they had built called fraud-to-engager, which automatically converted fraudulent profiles from other Hack Life Media sites site Ashley Madison bot profiles.
A Guide to Digital Safety
At the time, I was shocked by the sheer number of fake women. Nine years later, this could describe any number of social media sites that have become swamped with bots and AI-generated absurdity — and charge you dating the privilege of interacting with techno-phantoms. Hack problem is, human beings are interacting with these AI images and suggestions, in hack cases imagining they are engaging with real people. It is like the whole world has become the Ashley Madison ofand the more we want to talk to each other about it, the less likely dating are to find a human to talk to.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. You can follow them annaleen and their website is techsploitation. Receive a weekly dose of discovery in your inbox! Site also keep you up to date with New Scientist events and special offers. Explore https://telegram-web.online/farmers-only-dating-search.php latest news, articles and features.
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