It’s been a while since we heard from Ashley Madison, the infidelity website that was the victim of a major hacking scandal, costing CEO Noel Biderman his job. All of that went down nearly a year ago, but the company is finally back, and ready to move forward, with new leadership and a plan to rebrand itself.
On Tuesday, the company revealed that Rob Segal is now the CEO of Avid Life Media (ALM), Ashley Madison’s parent company, while James Millership is the new President.
Both of them have now been on the job for three months, but their roles are only being revealed now, along with their plans to transform the company going forward, putting everything that happened last year to bed for good.
ALM first admitted that it was hacked in July of 2015. The number of users who had some of their information stolen in the hack was said to be somewhere around 37 million, though there was some speculation that that number was somewhat trumped up, given the high probability of users using burner email addresses to create accounts.
The Ashley Madison hack was big news, not only in light of other, similar incidents, like the Target hack, but because of the nature of the site. As a service built on secrecy, Ashley Madison needed to have the absolute trust of its users that their information would be kept safe. This hack was incredibly damaging to the company’s reputation.
In a statement, Segal apologized for the incident, and the problems is may have caused its users.
“A year ago, Avid Life Media was silenced by a devastating, criminal hack that affected our company and some of our members. The company is truly sorry for how people’s lives and relationships may have been affected by the criminal theft of personal information. That’s why we’re charting a new course and making some big changes,” he said.
To prevent something similar from happening again, the company said its investing in security enhancements, while also partnering with Deloitte to put in new security safeguards. The company is also going to start offering payment options that are more secure than entering a credit card, though it did not say what those would be.
What Segal and Millership want to do going forward is completely rebrand Ashley Madison.
“We’re investing heavily in technology – and we’re looking at acquisitions, a total rebranding, new features, partnerships and new ventures,” Millership said in a statement.
The company will also be building a new office in Toronto.
Getting rid of bots
One major part of that effort will be to, once and for all, rid the site of bots, or fake profiles that are meant to impersonate female users in order to lure in unsuspecting male users. There are said to be five male users for every one female user on the site, and a service like this simply doesn’t work if there are just a bunch of guys talking to each other, so Ashley Madison created fake profiles in order to drive up the ratio of male to female members.
After the incidents last year, the board of directors at ALM ordered an investigation into the proliferation of bots, finding that the company stopped using them in North America in 2014, and in the rest of the world in 2015.
“My understanding is that bots are widespread in the industry, but they are no longer being used, and will not be used, at Avid Life Media and Ashley Madison,” Millership said.
Even if the site itself is done using bots, and that’s somewhat questionable, given that there will reportedly still some on the site as of late last year, that doesn’t mean it’s entirely off the hook.
In an intervew with Reuters, Segal and Millership revealed that the company is currently under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. While they said neither of them know what the focus of the FTC investigation is, specifically, the use of bots is the most likely answer, and it could lead to the company paying a hefty fine.
“That’s a part of the ongoing process that we’re going through,” Segal told Reuters. “It’s with the FTC right now.”
An investigation like that is the least of the company’s problems, though, Following the hacking scandal, and the reveal that some of its female users were fake, Ashley Madison is going to have an uphill climb winning back the trust of its users.
(Image source: media.ashleymadison.com)
