The latest casualty of the Ashley Madison hack is CEO Noel Biderman

By Lulu Chang August 28, 2015

Ashley Madison Hack

The latest casualty of the Ashley Madison hacking scandal? The company’s CEO, Noel Biderman. The executive, who actually runs Ashley Madison’s parent company, Avid Life Media, has stepped down following what is possibly the largest public airing of dirty laundry in the history of the Internet. In a statement posted on Avid Life Media’s website, the company explains, “This change is in the best interest of the company and allows us to continue to provide support to our members and dedicated employees. We are steadfast in our commitment to our customer base. We are actively adjusting to the attack on our business and members’ privacy by criminals.”

While the company describes the decision as a “mutual agreement,” the considerable drama that has surrounded the melee thus far certainly leaves plenty to the imagination regarding the nature of Biderman’s departure.

The now ex-CEO himself was himself on the list of leaked users of the site, with the records revealing that he had multiple extramarital affairs, one of which lasted at least two years. But given that he served as the head of a company whose motto was “Life is short. Have an affair,” this doesn’t seem to be particularly shocking news. At least he believed in his own product.

Biderman has been at the helm of Ashley Madison for nearly a decade — he previously served as the chief operating officer of Ashley Madison’s old parent company, before moving into the role of president when Avid Life Media took over the adultery site. He has served as CEO since 2010, and in his lengthy tenure in the cuckolding industry, has earned the nickname, “King of Infidelity.” Probably not something you’d want on a tombstone, but hey, to each his (or her) own.

37 million Ashley Madison users have been exposed since the hack, which has created a veritable media maelstrom and an offer of 500,000 Canadian dollars as a reward for information related to those responsible for the huge data breach.

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Ashley Madison ex-CTO threatens Brian Krebs with lawsuit over hacking claims

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Raja Bhatia, the ex-chief technology officer at Ashley Madison, has not been pleased with some of the claims made about him by the media in the wake of the hacked data being revealed. Emails between him and the then-CEO of Ashley Madison, Noel Biderman, suggested Bhatia had done some hacking of his own, which he now disputes.

In fact, he's gone so far as to have his lawyer send a threatening email to the person who first published these claims and the emails, Brian Krebs, of KrebsonSecurity. In the letter, Bhatia, through his lawyer, demands that the claims be removed and that Krebs himself post a retraction and correction, stating that Bhatia did not hack any sites, but merely notified Biderman about security holes he had found in Nerve.com.

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Hacked? No problem, says Ashley Madison, whose user base is “still growing”

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A little hacking never hurt nobody. At least, that's the mantra Ashley Madison is repeating, as the adultery website reports that it is "still growing" despite the fact that the user information of some 37 million site visitors was recently compromised. According to parent company Avid Life Media, last week saw "hundreds of thousands" of new members join the site, and in a statement released Monday, the company channeled Mark Twain by insisting that, "Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated." Apparently, the desire to cheat for some people is so strong that even the threat of exposure isn't enough to deter them.

Moreover, Avid Life Media says a good number of the new members of Ashley Madison are women, no doubt a response to recent reports that many of the female users were fake, bots, or entirely inactive. Said the company, "This past week alone, hundreds of thousands of new users signed up for the Ashley Madison platform -- including 87,596 women." And just for good measure, they pointed out that by their calculations, women alone sent some 2.8 million messages last week, a sure sign of their active presence on the site. While men still outnumber women, Avid Life Media claims that the discrepancy is not that high, with the ratio between the sexes a mere 1.2 to 1.

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John McAfee: How no one got laid on Ashley Madison

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John McAfee is one of the most influential commentators on cybersecurity anywhere in the world. His new venture -- Future Tense Central -- focuses on security and personal privacy-related products. McAfee provides regular insight on global hacking scandals and internet surveillance, and has become a hugely controversial figure following his time in Belize, where he claims to have exposed corruption at the highest level before fleeing the country amid accusations of murder (the Belize government is currently not pursuing any accusations against him).

No one got laid on Ashley Madison -- or nearly no one. Clearly, Noel Biderman, chairman of Avid Life Media, lucked out. As to the rest, even Josh Duggar appears to have hooked up outside of Ashley Madison -- at a strip club to be precise. Tens of millions of men paid up to $1,000 or more to find a cheating housewife, and instead, found a clever bot with which to converse.