Leaked data shows there were barely any women on hacked cheating site

folarin okunola

August 27, 2015 2:17 PM

Right now, Ashley Madison is doing what it can to catch the hackers, with the company even offering a $376,000 bounty for information that leads to their arrest.

Hackers threaten to leak Ashley Madison's 37 million clients

It’s not a hidden fact that cheating site which was recently hacked, Ashley Madison has fake female profiles to engage users - it's even in the ToS that the website "is geared to provide you with amusement and entertainment."

However, when its user data was leaked to the public, people got a chance to see just how many women there are on the website exactly, and determine just how many of them are fake.

READ: Owner of Ashley Madison website confirms some authentic data leaked

Editor-in-chief at Gizmodo, Annalee Newitz, researched the data dump in an effort to determine the site's precise female population and found that barely any of the 5.5 million profiles marked as "female" actually used the website.

Newitz considered several factors to get to that conclusion. First, she checked email addresses and discovered around 10,000 accounts which use the ashleymadison.com domain, which definitely means that they're fake.

Second, she discovered that 68,709 female profiles were created from a single IP: 127.0.0.1. This means all those profiles were created from a computer located within the company's HQ. She also discovered that the most common surname on the website for women is unusually identical to that of an ex-employee's.

What truly convinced Newitz, however, is a data field marked "mail_last_time." It shows a time stamp of the last time a member has checked his/her inbox, and she discovered that only 1,492 women ever checked theirs.

READ: Hackers threaten to leak Ashley Madison's 37 million clients

Apart from confirming that the website's real users are "paying for a fantasy," she also confirmed that accounts marked "<paid_delete>" still have all their data intact despite people paying to have them deleted.

Right now, Ashley Madison is doing what it can to catch the hackers. The company even offered a $376,000 bounty for information that leads to their arrest.

folarin okunola