Noel Biderman (photo) was born in 1971 in Toronto, Canada. He holds a law degree from York University Osgoode Hall Law School.
He started Ashley Madison in 2001, in Canada.
Ashley Madison is a dating commercial website particularly geared towards married people, or those in a committed relationship.
It promises that the secret will be
safe. However, the promise was shattered when computer hackers broke into the
website and released details of millions of its 'users' identities'.
On July 15 2015, a group calling itself "The Impact Team" stole
the user data of Ashley Madison. The group
copied personal information about the site's user base, and threatened to
release users' names and personally identifying information if Ashley Madison
was not immediately shut down.
In response, Ashley Madison posted a
message on its website stating that the company was working with authorities to
investigate. The company also condemned the hackers, stating they were not “hacktivists"
but criminals:
"It is an illegal action against
the individual members of AshleyMadison.com, as well as any freethinking people
who choose to engage in fully lawful online activities. The criminal, or
criminals, involved in this act have appointed themselves as the moral judge,
juror, and executioner, seeing
fit to impose a personal notion of virtue on all of society. We will not sit
idly by and allow these thieves to force their personal ideology on citizens
around the world."
On 18 and 20 August, the group leaked more than 25 gigabytes of company
data, including user details.
A second, larger, data dump occurred
on 20 August 2015, the largest file of which comprised 12.7 gigabytes of
corporate emails.
Hackers allege that Ashley Madison received
$1.7 million a year from people who paid to shut down user profiles created on
the site. The company falsely asserted that paying them would "fully
delete" the profiles, which the hack proved was untrue.
Following the hack, communities of Internet
vigilantes began combing through to find famous individuals.
France24 reported that 1,200 Saudi
Arabian email addresses were in the leaked database, and in Saudi Arabia
adultery can be punished with death.
In the days following the breach, extortionists
began targeting people whose details were included in the leak, attempting to
scam over US$ 200 worth of Bitcoins from them. One company started offering a
"search engine" where people could type email addresses of colleagues
or their spouse into the website, and if the email address was on the database
leak, then the company would send them letters threatening that their details
were to be exposed unless they paid money to the company.
On 24 August 2015, Toronto police
announced that two unconfirmed suicides had been linked to the data breach, in
addition to "reports of hate crimes connected to the hack”. Unconfirmed
reports say a man in the U.S. died by suicide.
Users whose details were leaked are filing a
$567 million class-action lawsuit against Avid Dating Life and Avid Media, the
owners of Ashley Madison, through Canadian law firms Charney Lawyers and Sutts,
Strosberg LLP.
