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Ashley Madison settles charges over its massive data breach
Ashley Madison is paying the price for the hack that exposed the info of 36 million customers, and we don't just mean through executive departures. The owners of the cheat-on-your-spouse site, Ruby Corp, have settled charges from both the US Federal Trade Commission and 13 states alleging that it both misled users and didn't do enough to protect their info. The actual fine is small -- Ashley Madison was intended to pay a total of $17.5 million, but can only afford to pay just over $1.6 million. However, the reforms may go a long way toward solving some of the underlying problems that led to both the breach and shady business practices.
Ashley Madison gives infidelity a new look
Trust is one of the few commodities that you can't get more of by spending money and you can't regain it once it's been lost. When a relationship loses that fundamental belief in each other's reliability then there's almost nothing you can do to save it. Speaking of which, Ashley Madison is back and has launched a new ad campaign to convince people that it's capable of guarding your email addresses and credit card numbers. The site has undergone a glossy rebrand, with parent company Avid Life Media being renamed as Ruby to make it appear more feminine. The one thing that didn't survive the changes was the website's eye-catching tagline: "life is short, have an affair."
Ashley Madison insists that real women use its affair service
That Gizmodo investigation of leaked data suggesting that most of the women on Ashley Madison's affair-seeking service were fake? Completely bogus... if you ask Ashley Madison. It claims that there are plenty of real live women on the site -- the ratio of paying men to active women (who get to use it for free) is reportedly 1.2 to 1, and women sent 2.8 million messages just in the past week. Gizmodo made "incorrect assumptions" about what some of the data fields meant, Ashley Madison says. Whether or not that's true, you'll want to keep the data in context. The service isn't outlining the ratio of real to fake women, so it's not clear whether real women are bountiful or needles in the proverbial haystack.
Ashley Madison offers $376,000 bounty to help find hackers
The Impact Life hackers might not release any more data they stole from adultery-enabling site Ashley Madison, but the legal investigation into who exactly is responsible for the security breach is just getting started. As reported by The Independent, Ashely Madison's parent company Avid Life Media (ALM) is offering a $500,000 (in Canadian dollars, about $376,000 US as of this writing) reward for any information leading to "identification, arrest and prosecution" of those responsible for the hack. It's the first major step that ALM is making to find out what happened to its data, and it's also a very public confirmation that the data Impact Life stole is legit. High-profile security researchers had said as much in the days immediately following the hack, but the initial statement from Ashley Madison was a bit less concrete.
