New analysis shows over 99 percent of the women on Ashley Madison were fake

As soon as the Ashley Madison hackshit earlier on this month, it didn’t take long for researchers to begin poring within the details and data. Impact Team, the group behind the hack, declared that it was releasing the information because Ashley Madison had lied about the male-female account ratio on its internet site. At the time, the hackers advertised that 90-95% of the accounts on Ashley Madison were male, with “thousands” of fake female profiles. New research shows this may were a dramatic underestimation.

Gizmodo’s Analee Lewis combed through the database, shopping for tell-tale signs that the 5.5 million female accounts on Ashley Madison were fake. Sure enough, she found some ashley msdison, including IP addresses that showed accounts were created from 127.0.0.1 and 1000s of accounts that listed an AshleyMadison.com email address as their primary contact point. These email addresses were even listed in sequential, bot-like fashion — 100@ashleymadison.com, 200@ashleymadison.com, etc.

One vital piece of information captured into the leak was the last date a user had checked their messages. In case a user never checked their inbox, the field was completely blank. If they logged in even once, that information was recorded. Ashley Madison also records the last time a user answered messages; this is often handled in a separate field without actually clicking on the inbox, which explains why the data logs show different numbers for the women who checked mail versus replying to a message. Read More