Avid Life Media has been trying to recover ever since. The District of Columbia had more Ashley Madison users per capita than any other city as of last May, and more than an estimated 15,000 email addresses in an online server hosting the stolen data came from.gov or.mil government servers.
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“We certainly feel that the Ashley Madison brand can be repositioned”, Segal said, adding that there will be “a vastly different approach to how she is marketed”. Furthermore, the dating website reportedly had bots designed specifically to target customers who paid a premium price for a “guaranteed affair”.
Avid Life Media, which owns and operates Ashley Madison, says it has hired Rob Segal as CEO and James Millership as president.
Ashley Madison was attacked by cyber-criminals a year ago and the identities of its users revealed online. “Have an affair”, wants to rebrand.
Almost a year after a hack that exposed the private sex lives of millions of users, the infidelity dating website Ashley Madison is hoping to revive its credibility (and, we assume, revenues).
According to the report, those “fembots” ran until late 2015, although the company stopped using them in the US, Canada and Australia earlier.
The new chief executive of Avid Life Media, Rob Segal, told Reuters he isn’t sure what the FTC is focusing on, but knows the investigation includes these allegations.
The interview is the first time that senior management have spoken to the media since the hack previous year and the new CEO grabbed the opportunity to apologise to the sites members.
The closely-held outfit is now spending millions to improve that security and look at payment options that offer more privacy to customers, the news agency reported.
According to the executives, Ashley Madison’s male-to-female ratio is five to one, and an Ernst & Young report commission by the company showed that computer programs impersonated real women that spoke to paying male customers.
Since the breach, membership has grown, he said, but revenue has declined 25 to 28 per cent to a projected $80 million this year, a drop he attributes to the loss of some of the company’s largest customers.
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Even still, Avid faces a legion of issues, including class-action lawsuits. The website’s slogan is “Life is short”.
