Ashley Madison Under FTC Investigation As New Leadership Team Plots Revival

Ashley Madison is currently under investigation by the FTC as the company looks to rebuild itself with new leadership after last year’s devastating hack.

In April, Ashley Madison parent company Avid Life Media hired two new executives, CEO Rob Segal and President James Millership, after former CEO and “king of infidelity” Noel Biderman resigned from the company.

And the new team has now apologised for the security breach in the first senior leadership interview since the incident, saying they are “profoundly sorry” about the hack.

The executives recently spoke to Reuters about the state of the company after the breach and subsequent media & legal fallout, and how they plan to revive the business over coming years.

The Avid Life executives said the company lost over 25% of its revenue after last year’s hack, and in addition to having to deal with multiple US & Canadian class action lawsuits filed by former customers, the Toronto-based company is also the focus of an “ongoing” FTC investigation.

A report by Ernst & Young confirmed that Ashley Madison used “fembots” to lure customers into paying for subscriptions, which found that some US users connected with foreign fembots in late 2015 as they were being phased out from Ashley Madison’s international markets, despite having been shut down in the US, Canada and Australia in 2014.

In terms of the site’s security, Millership & Segal said Avid Life was spending millions to improve security and payment options, having hired cyber security experts from Deloitte – who said they had found “simple backdoors in Avid Life’s Linux-based servers”.

In terms of the future, the execs said the business plans acquisitions & partnerships, with $50m to spend, and spoke of repositioning the Ashley Madison brand with a “vastly different” marketing approach.

Check out the interview here.